(This is a piece that comes from a distant past, when I walked through the darkest roads with only a single lantern to light my way. And now I walk along different ones, but the path is full of unlit lamp posts that turn on as I pass. Tac. There it is. I’ve just lit one on your road.
If you want to know what I think, here it is: the key must be searched not where the lamp post stands, but where the darkness is, under the carpets, where all the dust you didn’t want to see hides. Dust lit by the moon, which keeps existing even when it’s hidden, just like all those pieces waiting to be gathered and carried with affection into your box).
She wasn’t really the right person to say it; after all, she was like that man with all those supposed qualities who, in the end, didn’t possess even one that was truly his own, nothing that made him who he was, and not someone else. Yet she thought that maybe one could give some credit to that pumpkin sitting on his neck by accident, grinding out things that were extraordinary simply because they were different from anyone else’s, and often inexplicably and creatively insane in the way creative madness tends to be.
We want to be understood, appreciated, but our blood doesn’t understand; maybe it speaks a foreign language no one has studied yet and for which no interpreter exists. Or maybe it’s because to understand comes from the Latin “to take with oneself,” meaning to contain someone, and if someone is already full of everything they carry inside, how can they contain another person entirely, unless they empty themselves a little to make space?
Imagination serves her by embellishing things, even when they don’t change, and maybe that’s why she loves dreaming. She imagines inhabitants who breathe by inhaling sleep from each other’s mouths, so one could sleep forever while living elsewhere. In the end, wanting to live for someone else is nothing but the failure of selfishness, which opens a new shop right next door with a partner.
And maybe it’s not even true that one “does nothing”; one does everything others would never do, because in their minds the thought wouldn’t even make it onto the loom. And so what if one isn’t understood, they told Alice you don’t live to please others.
If you really want to know what she thinks, here it is: she believes she’s already said too much, and like a chameleon she needs to run and hide among colors that aren’t hers, among words upon words. When you’re too exposed, you risk too many cuts, and she’s run out of bandages. But she can still sleep, and there she can be just one, without having to hide, and that’s what she’ll do.
If the words run out and she has nothing left to cover herself with, she’ll die of cold, or worse, she’ll be forced to show her true colors, and if the one in front of her were an enemy, he’d kill her in two minutes, because her eyes would betray her.
Self‑determination: that was the not‑so‑subtle difference between before and after. She had forgotten how to do it.
In the “never again” there is a kind of peace, the peace of not having to be what others see or think they see. There is peace in total nihil; nihil contains chaos, but it’s also boring, and in the end… who knows. There’s still time for… who knows.
She didn’t know for what, but now it was dawn, and she could finally go to sleep, thinking as always that with the light on you can’t die, because you stay awake and you see it coming, and at least you prepare a little. And if the night has passed, there’s another day.
We live with the constant anxiety of already knowing a certain ending; maybe that’s why she had to believe in chocolate cream and in bodies living in space in houses without walls. In the end, some people’s function is to save others from themselves without knowing it, with nothing but a written word disguised as a fairy tale.
“Keep telling the story, so I won’t die,” she told him, “or at least I won’t think about it. And when it comes, you’ll invent something that makes it less frightening, and I’ll come get you later, when it’s your time. But for now, keep telling me how the pig jumped into the basin and, sinking to the center of the earth, fell on the king’s head while he was lying in his bed in the middle of the forest. And the trees laughed, and the fish leapt out of the lake and bowed to us.”
And without even realizing it, I was already asleep, and you were the director of my sleep with the lights on.
If you keep the camera running, you can turn off the lamp; in daylight no one dies;
it’s stupid, but I’ve always believed it.
There’s too much light
