I am floating on the water surface and it’s not an unpleasant feeling. I am watching the things surrounding me from behind a screen or a glass. I can’t reach out and touch them. No, that’s not correct: I don’t want to reach out and touch them. Things, people, voices: all seem so pointless now and I’m still trapped in my two-week absence. However, I know that it’s time I started concentrating on the old routines while what I’d like to have is just the chance of keeping alive the feelings and experiences I had these last two weeks. Whenever I come back from my journeys I always think it’s going to be different, I delude myself that it’ll be impossible that things will stay the same, that there’ll always be a core which will remain unspoiled within myself, but it’s sheer delusion. Things wane, slowly but unavoidably. Just a few days away from home – if you can call it home – and you forget what you have left, or at least you forget what is unimportant. Dry leaves falling off their branches. When you’re back, before being caught by the same old rat race, there is a time gap in between: you are no longer there (with your body, you might say), but you’re not here (with your mind, you might add). You are nowhere, you are everywhere, you are free. Apparently free.
“What am I? What am I doing here? Could things have taken a different course? What would have become of me if I had acted in a different way, if I had been more insistent, if I had had – let’s tell the bitter truth – more guts? What have I missed?” With my imagination I have tried to purge my life of all that came into it after 1998 and I know it’d be a poorer life I’d be leading now. I can’t even imagine whether it’d been better or not: I draw a sort of balance but I don’t know the place where I should put my character. I’ve understood that I don’t hate the idea of living (or of being born) as I once romantically thought I did, oh no, but I do hate the idea of not being able to lead different – and parallel – lives at the same time: every life is determined and conditioned by the lives you don’t live. So I seem to love life too much, in a way a human being can’t bear. I’d like to have both what I have had until now and the alternatives I somehow rejected – without knowing so. It’s horrible to think about the things that might have happened if only you had gone that path and not the other one you actually took (and if you had gone the former, you’d be regretting that you didn’t take the latter: you can’t hide this fact either). Even in a very mundane way, whenever I have some days off and must decide where to go, I’d always like to go to all the places I have loved in my life and every time I feel sad not being able to see them all at the same time and having to choose one, which means discarding all the other ones. Paradoxically, I could say that I’m embittered because I cannot be ubiquitous and almighty.
Now I am back and I am floating on the water surface because I don’t feel like plunging into any depths. It makes me uncomfortable to think that sooner or later I’ll start pondering over the same old subjects and I’ll go on cutting the same flesh. Mine, that goes without saying. I enjoy this silence as I know it’s so fragile.
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