Chapter 34 : When Truth Doesn't Need Words

‘’In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

 — Albert Camus

The metallic taste of blood, filled Alex's mouth as he bit back words that wouldn't change anything.  The courthouse air filled with a sterile scent of fresh paint, old wood and bureaucracy.  A storm of venomous doubts, accusations, and old grudges roared in his throat like wildfire, yet he choked them back with a clenched jaw. In place of defense—he found something stronger: stoic silence.  The hollow echo of footsteps against marble flooring marked time like a metronome, each one bringing him closer to the end of almost twenty years marriage. As he sat down in the room his fingers traced the smooth wooden bench beneath him, each groove a reminder of their first home together—where Anatig had transformed bare walls into dreams with nothing but color samples and determination. Now those same dreams would dissolve into legal terminology and court stamps.

The starched collar of his shirt scratched against his neck as he straightened it for the hundredth time, a nervous gesture that only emphasized its futility. Across the aisle one step away, Anatig sat with the precise disciplined posture she'd cultivated in her new gym studio. Her perfume—something expensive and foreign that had never graced their relationship—drifted across the space between them like an invisible boundary. Her gaze fixed beyond the judge's bench, where Lithuania's white knight—proud and unyielding on its red shield—watched their unravelling with centuries of detached indifference.  Alex studied the knight, seeing in its rigid posture all of his own failed attempts at nobility—every time he'd tried to be the protector, provider and perfect husband. The woman who once sought refuge for her frozen feet at his during roaring storms now crossed her ankles with the icy precision of a stranger’s heart. The space between them quivered with unspoken accusations and apologies, each swallowed bitterness festering into silent wounds that clung to the soul like a cold, creeping rot. The judge's questioning cut through the sterile atmosphere with surgical precision: "What are the reasons behind your divorce?"

In an instant, Alex felt twenty years of shared breaths—from morning coffee to goodnight kisses, all compressed into this single moment. The black wooden podium felt cool beneath his palms as he stood, facing the judge from across the vast room. His throat constricted, then released. “If we ever had a spark—a shared dream, a moment when our hearts beat as one—it's gone now, turned to ash. We've lost our way; our paths have split like earth cracked open by drought. We no longer love—we cling to hollow hopes, fragile as glass, shattering with every word left unsaid. Now we are strangers, mere echoes of lovers who once shared a home, a heartbeat, a whispered vow. All that's left is the sting of the past and the weight of what will never be again.”

Anatig's sharp intake of breath split through the silence like a blade, but she remained as still and cold as the September wind outside. Her rigid spine and crossed hands spoke volumes—a story of endings written long before they entered this room.  "We are strangers to each other now, we can’t even teach our kid same values, that is how different we became " Alex continued, each word both poison and antidote.  “We simply don’t want to find a way to be together… that’s all.” He turned his head to study Anatig's face one final time, searching for any trace of the woman who had once shared his dreams, his bed, his life. What he found instead was the cruel revelation contained within her eyes that he had been replaced even before he left.

The courthouse doors closed behind him with the authority of a tomb seal. Cool Autum air bit at his face as he stood on the steps, divorce papers in his hands. A young couple passed by, their fingers intertwined, their breath mixing in the cold air. His own fingers felt numb, disconnected—much like the rest of him would soon become. The couple disappeared into the crowd, leaving him with an unexpected thought: perhaps endings were necessary for beginnings.

The drive back to his hometown stretched before him like a funeral procession. Each kilometre marker counted down losses: his marriage at the courthouse steps, his identity somewhere along the highway, his future plans scattered like dead leaves in his wake. By the time he reached his mother's friend's Soviet-era apartment block, the numbness had spread from his fingers to his core.  That first night, he tried to sleep in the narrow bedroom that smelled of glue from fresh wallpapers and memories from recent events. The ceiling's water stains formed shapes that shifted in the darkness another Rorschach test of his failures. Outside, Klaipėda's winds carried the salt-heavy breath of the Baltic, a reminder of how far he'd drifted from the life he'd dreamt.  Sleep came in fragments, each dream a replay of the courthouse scene, but with different endings that always led to the same beginning: here, alone, in this room that felt both foreign and familiar.

Morning arrived like a reluctant visitor and Alex found himself going through the motions of his carefully constructed routine: laying out his yoga mat, preparing his meditation cushion, opening his laptop to check client emails. But everything started heading in the wrong direction. The practices that once anchored him now felt like performances in a play he'd forgotten the lines to. His hands shook slightly as he tried to light his morning meditation candle, spilling hot wax across his fingers. The pain barely registered—the first sign that something was fracturing beneath his composed surface.  Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. He forced himself to maintain the façade of moving on: psychology classes at LLC university, yoga sessions, tantric gatherings and public speaking events. Each activity became another brick in a wall of pretense, each spreadsheet another attempt to calculate his way back to wholeness. But beneath this carefully constructed scaffold, fault lines were forming. His voice during lectures sounded increasingly distant, as if someone else were speaking through him. During yoga, his body moved through the poses while his mind wandered through the ruins of his marriage, searching for the exact moment everything had started to crumble.

Depression didn't announce itself with fanfare—it crept in like evening shadows in a Lithuanian winter, gradually dimming all color from his world. The first clear sign came during his morning meditation. As sunlight struggled through the grimy Soviet-era windows, his hands trembled so violently he couldn't hold his mala beads. They scattered across the floor like broken promises, and he left them there, unable to gather either the beads or himself. His university lectures became exercises in controlled panic. During a discussion on attachment theory, the fluorescent lights hummed too loudly, each student's movement felt too sharp, their voices too piercing, their gazes too knowing. He found himself counting ceiling tiles instead of contributing to the discussion: forty-three tiles, forty-four breaths, forty-five minutes until escape. His own voice, when he forced it out, sounded like it belonged to someone else—a stranger trying to explain human connection while feeling increasingly disconnected.

The isolation crept in like frost on windowpanes. First, he stopped responding to WhatsApp messages—what could he say when "I'm fine" felt like swallowing glass? His phone's battery died on a Tuesday.  He didn't plug it in until Friday. The black screen offered a strange comfort, reflecting nothing but darkness back at him. Each unanswered call became another brick in the wall between him and the world. The apartment, with its familiar smells of boiled potatoes and cigarette smoke coming from a lobby outside that once triggered nostalgia, now felt like a tomb of memories. Fifteen steps from bed to bathroom, eight to the kitchen, twelve to the front door he hadn't opened in five days. Alex’s mind measured his world in these shortening distances, struggling to stay sane as each day’s orbit shrank like a tightening noose around his soul. The ceiling of his room, once white, now as if stained with the ashen pallor of a Lithuanian winter, seemed like a blank slate mocking his fractured thoughts. Absorbing the dim light, it mercilessly reflected the wasteland of his soul. Sleep was no refuge—only a chain of false beginnings, each collapsing into itself. Hunger faded to distant murmurs of the stomach, smothered by the relentless emotional weight gathering in his chest—heavy as a frozen icicle. He'd lie in bed counting his heartbeats, each one a hammer against his ribs, until the dawn light crept through torn curtains. Sometimes, he caught himself holding his breath, wondering if the walls would hold their position if he just stopped breathing all together. The ceiling's water stains became his midnight companions, shifting shapes that told stories of all his failures. His body began betraying him in small ways at first. The tremor in his hands while holding his morning water glass became a constant companion. His jaw ached from grinding teeth he didn't realize he was clenching. During his last attempted yoga class, his body refused to hold warrior pose—his legs shaking not from physical strain but from the effort of containing something vast and terrible. 

That winter evening, the familiar digital clock on the tower across the street blinked 21:21, its yellow numbers cutting through the kitchen’s darkness like a rocket launch countdown in reverse. His reflection fractured across the window, multiplied by streetlight and shadow. Outside, an old woman hurried home from the nearby Maxima’ supermarket, wearing traditional wool scarves pulled tight against the coastal chill, carrying heavy bags for the weekend. Her ordinary routines felt like a mockery of his unravelling. The kitchen window reflected his fractured face—father, husband, son, failure—roles scattering like myths like myths in the cold Klaipėda winter blizzard. The man staring at his reflection wore the T-shirt from his last meditation retreat— “The journey through darkness is sacred” printed around a serene Buddha—but the eyes that met his gaze belonged to a ghost, hollowed out and haunted by the echoes of abandoned peace. Among his scattered notes and diaries his fingers found Anatig's photograph in the kitchen drawer without looking, as if it had been waiting there, generating its own gravity. The image caught the yellow streetlight: their trip to Paris, her smile golden in amber light, before promises became responsibility and love became arithmetic.   Relationship that eroded in absences—the empty bed, the quiet rooms, desolate promises, the vanished warmth of morning kisses. Twenty years reduced to empty shadows. In his chest, a storm started gathering, dark and inevitable, pressure building like a front massive black cloud moving in from the Baltic Sea.

The carefully maintained facade—that masterwork of 'moving on'—cracked. His primal scream started low, from somewhere beneath his navel, rising through generations of masculine stoicism until it erupted with the force of a dying star. The sound assaulted his ears, alien and shattering—half the guttural shriek of a wounded creature, half the primal wail of a newborn thrust into the world’s chaos.

            The linoleum floor felt cold against his skin as he collapsed, each crack and stain a silent witness to his undoing. Outside, the Baltic wind howled in harmony with his grief, while sodium vapor lights painted his tears in shifting hues of amber and gold. In the narrow hallway, swallowed by artificial glow, Alex shed his clothes like a snake shedding its skin, unable to bear their weight any longer. Each garment felt like a lie he'd worn to please others—the spiritual seeker's meditation clothes, the professor's formal shirt, the entrepreneur's carefully chosen accessories.  His bare feet struck the floor with desperate rhythm, sending tremors through his bones. His fists met the linoleum, leaving constellations of blood—raw punctuation marks in the story of his suffering. Strands of torn hair scattered like burned ashes, his body wracked by convulsions that felt as old as sorrow itself. The neighbour’s muffled television sounds and cooking smells filtered through the walls—ordinary life continuing while his world imploded in release agony.

Time lost its meaning. Time blurred as Alex lay there, naked and trembling, his cheek clinging against the icy cold floor. The radiator's gentle hiss of heating up provided a strange lullaby, its rhythm matching his gradually slowing breath. Somewhere in the building a child laughed, the sound piercing through his cocoon of grief like a shaft of light.

The peculiar grayish-pearlescent rays of the winter morning pierced through the slits in the curtains, the morning light refracting through the shards of broken glass on the windowsill, transforming the room’s wall into a rainbow prism—beauty arising from wreckage. Alex lay motionless, watching dust particles dance a waltz in the beams of light. His body ached, but beneath the physical pain lurked something strange and unexpected—a profound stillness, like the silence after another ayahuasca ceremony. Rising from the floor, staggering, he began to gather the scattered remnants of his outburst. With trembling hands and lingering body he began gathering the scattered remnants of his outburst. Each piece of broken glass, strand of hair and each drop of dried blood became sacred artifacts of his transformation. They were the ruins of his former life—the weights he had to shed, the raw materials he was forced to leave behind in order to cling to life and keep moving forward. The morning light caught each fragment as he collected them, turning them into prisms that scattered light across the walls—a metaphor he couldn't ignore.  His first conscious breath that morning felt different—deeper, as if his lungs had discovered hidden chambers. The tantric breathing that once felt like performance now flowed naturally, each inhale threading his scattered pieces back together. Rock bottom, he realized, had become necessary ground zero for reconstruction. This transformation integrated itself through mundane moments. That first afternoon, he managed to make Calamine tea—a simple act that had seemed impossible just days before. The cup shaking in his hands, but he felt the warmth seep into his palms with new awareness. When a drop spilled, instead of cursing his clumsiness as he once would have, he watched the liquid spread across the table with fascination, understanding suddenly that even mistakes could create beautiful patterns.  His phone remained dead in the corner, its black screen no longer an accusation but a permission slip for silence. The thoughts that once clawed at his soul—about Anatig, about failure, about time slipping away—still drifted in, but now as faint echoes reverberating through desolate mountains, dissolving into a distant hush. In his journal, he wrote not the forced positive affirmations of before, but simple truths: Today I breathed. Today I felt. Today I survived. Today I forgive. Today I let go.

Even the yoga mat in the corner, which had collected dust for weeks, called to him differently now. When he finally unrolled it, it wasn't with his former desperate drive for transformation, but with the humble intention of simply feeling his body again. Each pose became a conversation with himself, each stretch a question rather than a demand. Sometimes he held child's pose for an entire session, learning that healing often looked more like surrender than achievement.

The wisdom from his Ayahuasca ceremonies months ago suddenly crystallized with new clarity. 'Sometimes we must break completely to find our true shape' had seemed like mystical platitude then, but now resonated in his marrow. Each sob from that night had acted as an archaeologist's brush, sweeping away decades of calcified attachments to reveal buried truth. His transformation revealed itself in quiet increments, like the delicate tracery of morning frost etching its fleeting patterns across a chilled windowpane. The sticky notes on his kitchen walls evolved from desperate affirmations into gentle reminders: "You are not your past" replaced "MUST SUCCEED!" The mirror that once reflected failure now showed something else—a man emerging from his own ashes, eyes clearer, face somehow younger.

Through daily practice, Alex learned to dance with his demons rather than flee from them. During morning meditation, the radiator's rhythmic clicking became a metronome for his breath. The Yoga Vasistha's teaching ‘’all is mind’’ that 'the universe exists in infinite consciousness experiencing itself' stopped being philosophical concept and became lived allegorical experience. In those quiet moments before dawn, he could no longer distinguish between the universe expanding in his chest and the one stretching beyond the stars. Most profoundly, his understanding of his parents transformed. Their limitations weren't his personal failures but echoes of their own wounded histories. This awareness sparked the courage to meet his real father—not with accusations, but with a simple, healing embrace. In that embrace, the weight of years’ pain began to crumble, as Alex grasped that their broken love, scarred by their own parents’ imperfect lessons, was all they had learned to give. His heart, once a fortress, became a garden where compassion started blooming alongside strength.

The mirror of his ex-wife's absence now reflected not loss but relief, each reflection showing him another facet of his emerging authenticity. What felt like disintegration was, in truth, a cosmic reorganization—through every terrifying and painful experience, the atoms of his identity split and reformed into something new, radiant, and necessary. The path ahead still held challenges, but they now appeared as stepping stones rather than obstacles. Soon clarity arrived like dawn after a storm—familiar yet startlingly new. His mind, once a turbulent ocean, settled into a still, crystal-clear lake of understanding. All his previous attempts at change had been like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded; now the trajectory aligned with effortless grace. This profound shift in perspective catalyzed remarkable changes in his life. He found himself engaging with others more authentically, particularly in his interactions with women, where subconsciously ingrained fear had previously held him back. Joy, once a distant concept, began weaving itself into the fabric of his daily experience. Most significantly, when he looked into his own child's eyes during their weekly video calls, he no longer saw reflections of his perceived inadequacies but rather glimpsed the divine dance of consciousness evolving through generations. As Alex's inner landscape transformed, his outer world began shifting to match his newfound authenticity.

The first client meeting for Green Bubble Studio happened in a café that smelled of cinnamon and coffee. His voice shivered slightly, not from fear now, but from an electric sense of potential as he pitched social media strategies to a skeptical barbershop owner. When the owner nodded and said 'yes,' Alex recognized this wasn't just about business; it was about creating genuine connections, just as he'd learned to reconnect with himself. His stepbrother's outreach with a collaborative project felt like the universe confirming his path. Each new business venture became a laboratory for applying his hard-won wisdom: authenticity over performance, service over profit, and connection over transaction. The 2020 Prema Tantra and Music Festival invitation to collaborate on promotion and set up arrived like a cosmic wink—a chance to blend his technical skills with his spiritual journey.  But the universe wasn't finished with its teaching just yet. Success flowed initially, but beneath the surface, old hidden unintegrated patterns started emerging in subtle ways. His desperate drive to prove himself—the same force that had once pushed him through countless yoga classes and tantric gatherings—now manifested in taking on too many clients, cutting corners, and spreading himself too thin. The borrowed equipment became a metaphor for borrowed confidence; the rushed strategies reflected his lingering fear of inadequacy in the field he was still learning.

The collapse came swiftly, like a wildfire igniting dry brush in the heat of summer. Four Facebook ad clients disappeared in a single afternoon, their muted screens a digital echo of his past losses. His bank balance notification felt like a mirror reflecting an uncomfortable truth: external success couldn't outrun internal wounds. The fear factor was still lingering somewhere deep down. The same pattern that had played out in his marriage—trying to maintain appearances while avoiding deeper issues—had manifested in his business approach. Then the 2020 pandemic arrived, not as an external catastrophe but as a global manifestation of the isolation he'd already intimately known. The empty streets of Klaipėda echoed with a familiar hollowness—one he'd experienced in those dark months after his divorce. This time, the silence murmured a different story, its ghostly breath carrying shadows of forgotten truths. His morning Wim Hof breathing practice, once a triumph of will over fear, became a lifeline in the uncertainty. Each cold breath grounded him in the present moment, making him still and content with whatever was coming his way. The borrowed equipment in his makeshift home studio stood as silent witnesses to dreams temporarily paused. When debtors began using the pandemic as an excuse to avoid payment, it stirred deep, old feelings of abandonment fear, another emotional pattern he thought he no longer held in his mind. At this point, Alex was left with only his writing, his sole refuge, yet he felt financial constraint weighing on his daily life. He began to pray to God quietly, asking for a job that would allow him to finish his book while earning money and restoring financial stability and his life. In this enforced silence, his mother’s unexpected support, amid other empty promises, taught him that true abundance often flows from unforeseen sources, and perhaps it was time to seek job alternatives. The pandemic did not create his challenges; it merely revealed them, stripping away illusions and leaving him with something far more valuable: an authentic readiness for what lies ahead.

An opportunity to relocate to Ghana for a new job arrived—not as an escape, but as a culmination. During those initial video calls, faces pixelated by distance, but heart clear with purpose, Alex recognized something profound: this wasn't just a job offer—it was an invitation to integrate everything he'd learned. His journey from broken a marriage and failed businesses had taught him that true growth comes not from running away but from running toward something with purpose and facing biggest fears head on. The same breathing techniques that had grounded him during his darkest moments now cantered him as he discussed work expectations and commitments with his African colleagues. His understanding of human psychology, hard-won through therapy and self-reflection, gave him unique insight into how to approach cultural bridges and manage business relationships.

The lessons of authenticity and vulnerability, learned in the raw stillness of his apartment floor, now empowered him to weave vibrant connections across continents. His gut feeling was neither grasping nor pushing away, he just knew that he would be going there and the only question that lingered in the back of his mind was: for how long? He made a promise to himself that, no matter what, he knows exactly what he needs to do.

                 The pandemic had stripped him of the illusion that security and comfort came from external circumstances, leaving him with the knowledge that true stability arose from within. His commitment wasn't born from desperation but from a deep understanding that transformation—whether personal or professional—required both surrender and discipline.

As he packed his belongings for Ghana, Alex found Anatig's old photograph at the bottom of a drawer. Looking at it now, he felt neither pain nor regret—only gratitude for the journey it had initiated. He placed it carefully back in a drawer and closed it, the memories he no longer needed to cling to. Understanding that sometimes the universe's greatest gifts come disguised as losses.

It was the Lithuanian spring and his final morning in Klaipėda.  The day broke clear and cold. Standing at his apartment window, watching the early light paint the Soviet-era buildings in shades of new promises, Alex understood that his breakdown had been necessary—not just for his own healing, but as preparation for the work ahead. He was no longer running from pain or chasing success. Instead, he was walking steadily toward a future that would require everything he'd learned about falling apart and coming back together stronger. The taxi arrived as the sun cleared the horizon. Closing the apartment door for the last time, Alex thanked the home for its lessons and shelter, smiling, knowing that endings are merely disguised beginnings. His transformation was not over—it had only prepared him for the next chapter. And this time, he was ready to write it with wisdom and dedication.

NEXT WEEK! Chapter 35 : The toll of Success

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