Habibi Albi

Freedom… It’s that pulse of life, that steady hum beneath your daily noise—your morning walks, your evening thoughts. But what if it stops? What if someone snaps their fingers and, suddenly, it’s gone, just like that? That’s when you feel it: the absence, the hollowed-out space where it used to be. It’s a silence louder than anything you've ever known.

See, freedom is fragile, a thin layer between you and someone else’s control. Most days, you don’t even notice it, don’t feel it brushing against your skin like the breeze. It’s quiet, almost invisible—until it’s taken away. And once it’s gone, once you feel that weight pressing down on your chest, you realize what freedom really was. You realize it was everything.

To be free is not to be watched over like prey, eyes marking your every step, mind calculating every move you make. Freedom is standing up straight, walking out the door with your head held high, feeling the ground beneath your feet belong to you. It’s not a privilege or a gift to be granted by the powerful; it’s a right, a necessary breath, the rhythm of a heart unrestrained. It’s knowing that tomorrow, you’ll still be yourself, that your choices, your words, your dreams—they’re all yours.

And the truth is, freedom isn’t as simple as “doing whatever you want.” No, it’s deeper than that. Freedom is having space to dream, to push back against the limits of yourself and the world around you. It’s the power to live unafraid, to let your thoughts roam beyond borders, beyond fears. When you’re truly free, you don’t live in a box, measured and contained. You expand, you reach. Freedom is that unmarked horizon, that open road.

But here’s the thing: freedom is the opposite of nothing. It’s the opposite of absence. And when it’s taken, when it's shattered by control, by violence, by fear—it doesn’t just disappear. No, it turns into something else, something thick and choking. It becomes desperation, that gnawing ache that keeps you awake at night, that memory of what you used to have, what you could touch, but can no longer hold. It’s a sense of loss so heavy, it could fill a room.

In a way, the struggle for freedom is what shapes us. When we fight for it, we learn our boundaries, and we learn the cost of losing them. Freedom is not easy, not simple, not something given. It’s something wrested, pulled from the jaws of history, of power, of oppression. Every person who’s tasted freedom and had it snatched away knows its price, knows it’s worth more than gold, more than anything you could touch or hold.

So, yes—freedom is what you feel when it's gone. It’s that ache in your gut when the world shrinks down to a cage, that fire in your chest that refuses to be extinguished. It’s the resilience of the spirit, the grit of a soul refusing to bow down. Freedom, once felt, can never truly disappear; it lives on in memory, in hope, in defiance. And it’s a thing worth fighting for, not because it’s easy, but because it’s everything.