Being Is Free. Expressing Costs.

I wake before language,
before the small committees of thought
start naming the light.
In that first unguarded second
I simply am—
no agenda, no résumé,
no need to prove gravity works.

Being is free.
Like air that does not invoice the lungs.
Like the horizon that never asks
who deserves its blue.

It is later
that the costs appear.
Later, when I reach for words
and feel their price tags
brush my fingers.

Expression arrives with toll booths.
Every sentence a crossing.
Every truth a bridge
built from something I must give up.

I learned this early.
A child notices silence first
as a place of safety.
Inside it, I could be vast
without explanation.
Inside it, even fear
had room to lie down.

But the world loves a voice
it can label.
It asks you to speak clearly,
to choose a side,
to flatten the weather of your mind
into forecast-friendly phrases.

Say what you mean,
they say,
as if meaning is a coin
kept neatly in one pocket.

I try.
Each attempt costs a little skin.

I say I feel,
and immediately the room rearranges itself—
chairs lean in judgment,
eyes begin accounting.

I say I don’t know,
and watch certainty sharpen nearby,
offended by my open hands.

Being needed none of this.
Being was a forest at dusk,
trees not introducing themselves,
roots intertwined without explanation.

In the forest,
no leaf apologizes for falling.
No river footnotes its direction.

Expression, though—
expression is walking that forest
with a clipboard,
trying to itemize wonder.

I do not hate language.
I love it the way one loves fire:
for warmth, for light,
and for its talent
for getting out of control.

Words can build homes
or burn them down.
They can cradle grief
or turn it into spectacle.

Sometimes I envy stones.
They express weight perfectly
without saying a thing.
Mountains communicate endurance
by simply not leaving.

The cosmos understands this economy well.
Stars do not explain themselves.
They burn,
and the burning is enough.

When a supernova happens,
no apology is issued.
No justification drafted.
Expansion does not seek permission.

And yet, here on this small,
busy planet,
to express is to risk exile.

You learn quickly
which parts of yourself are rentable
and which scare away tenants.

Joy is acceptable,
but not too loud.
Anger is permitted,
but only with credentials.
Sadness is tolerated
if it is productive.

Love—
love is the most expensive expression of all.
It demands time, vulnerability,
the willingness to be misunderstood
and stay anyway.

Being loves freely.
Expression negotiates.

I carry entire galaxies inside me
that have never seen daylight
because I could not afford
the social exchange rate.

There are thoughts I have never spoken
because they would require
explaining my contradictions.
Feelings left untranslated
because no language I know
can hold their temperature.

Sometimes I think
we are punished not for lying,
but for telling the truth
without the right packaging.

So we edit ourselves.
We compress.
We add disclaimers
to the rawness of our breath.

I become fluent in versions.
Professional me.
Polite me.
The me who knows when to stop.

Meanwhile, being waits patiently.
It does not argue.
It does not perform.

It shows up in small rebellions:
the way my chest loosens
when I stand alone under the sky.
The way tears arrive
without asking permission
from logic.

In those moments,
I remember that existence
is not a transaction.

The ocean does not charge waves
for reaching the shore.
The moon does not bill the tide
for loyalty.

Even black holes—
those masters of consumption—
ask nothing of light
except that it comes close.

So why do I ask myself
to justify every inner weather change?
Why do I demand receipts
for my own becoming?

Perhaps because expressing
turns the private into public,
and the public into a marketplace.

Once spoken,
a truth can be taxed,
misquoted,
used against you
or sold back at a premium.

Silence, then, becomes savings.
A quiet wealth
hidden under the floorboards of the soul.

But silence has its costs too.
Unexpressed things ferment.
They knock at night.
They lean into dreams,
heavy with unsent messages.

There is a balance
no one teaches us to calculate:
the price of speaking
versus the interest on unsaid life.

I am learning slowly,
with many overdrafts,
that expression need not be loud
to be real.

A breath is an expression.
A boundary is an expression.
Choosing not to explain
is sometimes the most honest sentence.

The cosmos, again, is my teacher.
Most of it is dark matter—
unseen, unnamed,
yet holding everything together.

What if my unspoken self
is not wasted,
but structural?

What if being does not demand
constant translation?

I imagine a future
where expression is less of a performance
and more of a tide—
coming and going
without applause.

Where words are offered
like fruit on a table,
not weapons or currency.

Where I can say this is me today
without footnotes,
and let tomorrow revise me
without shame.

Until then,
I practice small, brave expenditures.
I spend honesty on people
who understand that nuance exists.
I invest silence
where noise would cheapen meaning.

Being remains free—
a quiet inheritance
no one can repossess.

Expression costs, yes.
But sometimes the cost
is worth paying
to let a little starlight escape
the chest.

Not everything must be spoken.
Not everything must be hidden.

Between the two
is a living, breathing margin—
a place where I learn
to exist
without constantly explaining
why.

And in that margin,
I feel closer to the universe
than any perfectly worded truth—
vast, unfinished,
and finally allowed
to simply be.