And if you can’t shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it... - Konstantinos P. Cavafy

On hearing about powerful love, respond, be moved like an aesthete. Only, fortunate as you’ve been, remember how much your imagination created for you.

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details. And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.