Looking through the window, staring at the void, with my hand leaving on the glass an illusory mark of steam and warmth, I was thinking about my more than ordinary-less than ordinary existence, feeling my aspirations and daydreams fading away like fog in the sun, without pain, leaving just a sad whispered farewell.
The reality around me, instead, the room, the table, the chairs, were suddenly magnified like screaming for their right to my attention.
I felt empty, motionless like the chimney on top of my neighbours’ roof, full of carbon black, air, nothingness.
Felt my body as dirty as an old chrysalis, as I was turning into something unknown, something new and disgusting at the same time.
While water flew in the bathtub I thought this being of mine might not be. I felt useless. Indifferent to myself. I could have shot myself in the mouth and I wouldn’t have cared at all. In my mood, living with self-intolerance or dying didn’t make any difference.
Closed the water, put my coat on and went out. I hated myself while my hands moved, hated my mechanically repeated actions, the repetitiveness that covers you day after day while you pretend to live. On the other hand, going out naked would have just underlined the existence of its label logic, as for jars at a supermarket.
More than going I ran out as the building was on fire. I turned to look at it: tall, with all its windows like vitreous eyes and balconies like fake smiles and the big entrance door.
All of a sudden, the building picture disappeared before my eyes, swallowed by the memory of my old high school facade, with all its windows identical to each other, in ordered files, like the classes desks, to turn, then, into the image of the penitentiary where I once dreamed of finding myself, wearing a grey uniform, anonymous among others, with a number stuck at heart height.
Another convict was kindly greeting passing me by...
Jesus, no. He was one of the residents living on the fourth floor. I was dazed in front of him, unable to remove my tongue from the palate.
Undecided about what to say I simply nodded at him and turned on my heels walking away briskly sensing his amazed look on my back.
He couldn’t understand. He could have not understood even though I had tried to explain to him our condition. “We are prisoners”, I wanted to shout at him, “and we are unaware”.
I ran. I ran away from his naïve ignorance, from the weight of an explanation that I would not have liked to know myself. Ran, desperate, unable to breathe but kept on running.
I saw the people faces passing me by, expressionless, cold and indifferent and I wanted to shook them, throw away their shopping bags with the advertising of recycling printed on, jars, packages, bottles. I wanted to rip their clothes off, slash their chest and tear the heart out of them, just to show it to them, still alive, beating and spurting blood everywhere.
I stopped around the corner of a narrow side street. My forehead dropping sweat on my eyes, on my lips. I was tired, my chest lifted up like a bellows, couldn’t stand up and my feet were painful within my shoes.
Put my back to the wall and stretched my legs for a moment. While breathing I felt my heart in my throat, in my ears, in my hands, in my knees and feared to see it escaping from my mouth. It pumped, beating like a drum, alive, pulsing. And I was exhausted.
My hands pulled the neck of my jumper, suddenly too tight, while my sight fogged and I saw lots of coloured spots covering anything I looked at.
A child, likely popped up like a mushroom from the ground, as I hadn’t seen him, pulled the edge of my coat.
“Sir, are you all right?”
I probably looked at him with my eyes still wide open and a horrible expression due to my being breathless, because I saw him stepping back. Relaxed my eyelids, trying to smile, caressing his blonde hair. He was so young, sweet and naive, thinking he could become like me a cold, efficient citizen of the world
“Run away from here”, I told him, with still a broken voice. But he didn’t move, young and curious about anything
“Is it a new game?”, he asked.
How could I explain the horror around and within us?
“Yes”, I told him, “but now run!”
And I resumed my run, even though slower.
My legs suddenly stopped when, at the end of the side street, I found myself in front of the square surrounding my building.
I looked around, feeling like lost: I had not left at all.
I had run in a circle without realising it, deluding myself of escaping from being but a small part of the mechanism, from my being one among many other lost in the crowd of the city rush hours.
And my world, without even shaking up had let me run away but like a dog on a leash and now it was just reopening the door of my cell to get me back.
I wanted to cry, like when as a child I fought someone older and obviously I was beaten. I could run miles away from there, I would somehow return.
With the last strengths of a dead man walking went back home, threw my clothes around and plunged into the tub with a bit of an idea to drown but underwater my eyes just added water to water because I knew I could not escape and I could just bang my head against the walls of the cell I called life.
