A few minutes ago, I sent a message.

Nothing extraordinary. A few lines. One link. Twenty-five years distilled into a few hundred characters. And from that moment on, nothing depends on me anymore.

Hope is a strange thing. Not the idea of it, but the physical sensation. You probably know it yourself. It’s as though someone has cinched a leather strap around your chest. It doesn’t hurt. There simply isn’t enough air. You draw a breath with all your strength, yet it never quite reaches the bottom of your lungs. Your eyes sting for no reason. Every few minutes, you catch yourself checking your phone, even though you know perfectly well that nothing could possibly have happened yet.

You keep telling yourself, over and over: A man my age should know better.

He should know that the world isn’t waiting for his books. He should have lived through enough rejection to stop flinching. He should understand that there is no point in placing too much hope in a single message, a single person. In anything at all, for God’s sake.

And yet...

It doesn’t work that way.

Every time is different. Not because the expectations are greater—God knows they aren’t. If these years have taught you anything, it’s that expectations kill hope. The reason is simpler, more earthly: behind every such message lie years that can never be compressed into a handful of sentences. You try to tell the story behind a story, knowing perfectly well that what you’re really sending isn’t the story.

It’s yourself.

For years I thought writing was the hardest part. Then I became convinced it was translation. After that came publishing, the website, the illustrations, the endless revisions—everything that could always be made just a little better.

It turns out the hardest part begins only when there’s nothing left to improve. When you press Send. When the story stops belonging to you and sets out to find its own fate. And there is absolutely nothing you can do.

Except wait.

And wonder where that absurd, almost childlike urge comes from—to spread your arms and fly, even though you know perfectly well:

You have no wings.