I said : Kiss me, you’re beautiful. These are truly the last days.
Absurdity has always fascinated me, deeply entranced me into this world of peculiarities and strangeness. We must always assume that there is something more than just the ordinary course of things, the conventional, the standard. He acted in ways that could be easily translated and interpreted as absurd.
Paradoxical in his behavior, logical connections did not seem to occur very frequently in that big head of his, covered only by a trace of human hair. His eyes were pulled in, in an almost alien fashion, grotesque but at the same time full of energy, passion and livelihood. “This is absurd” he shouted. The complexity of the world, its bizarre choice of operating, its terrifying circumstances; many thought these to be just mere coincidences. Science cannot be absurd. “Well not if we let the subatomic world speak for itself”, he replied and very quickly my thoughts were shifted away from the dark surroundings of the cave we were located, and onto the dusted earth that lay outside, waiting to be conquered again by the human race. But were incapable of conquering anything; we hadn’t first become masters of our own selves, and to even think to begin dominating such a strong force cannot possibly occur by carrying such weakness. He was always reading books, absorbing them entirely like a human vacuum cleaner. It was almost like he was inhaling deeply the content, instead of simply scanning them through. His hunger was not physical, he did not have thirst for this world which was run by machines for already several years now. Instead, he was yearning those other worlds described in pages scattered around the ground of the cave, like litter after a thorough sweeping of the wind. He was longing for the past, and thankfully there was someone else among us, who had the courage to be grounded and always look for the best solutions to our given situation.
As his eyes were examining the specimen in front of him with extreme care the words “It doesn’t look good”came out of his mouth. “You can tell a lot from the color of a liquid” he continued. All those years studying science didn’t go to waste. But here we were, seven people, underneath the roaring ground, hit by shattering earthquakes often and enough to make us tremble, but also giving us the motivation to devise ways to predict the ones who were about to come. Weeks had gone by after that initial shock that left us incapable of producing useful thought, and in the months that followed we spent our time as efficiently as possible, by organizing the space around us, trying to find ways to always have food and gathering water in glass jars. After that, we started making the little space we had habitable, decorating it with anything remotely appropriate. We found an enjoyment that only the highest form of art can provide, when we watched the icicles glowing in the presence of the little amount of light that now and then was coming through. That world became an everyday existence. However, we didn’t contemplate our existence until much later, once survival had been taken care of, and there was available time for such endeavors.
He chose to isolate himself in that cold cave for months; he imagined his consciousness expanding after the first absurd experiment. But he was already half a man; his transformation took place in a very short period of time. He found this inexplicable beauty in nature, in isolation from society, in tranquility and stillness. “When are we going outside again? I miss my babies so much”. Her children were her only concern; she would often get outside despite the lurking dangers, searching for them in the middle of sandstorms, hurricanes, and ashes from volcano eruptions. Inside the cave everyone was thinking only one thing, but not a single one dared to speak it out. Most likely her kids were lost forever. But hope couldn’t be abolished. It was the only thing that we had left, despite the fact that we didn’t want to admit it. “Your beard looks awful” he suddenly sprout out of nowhere. I was staring into space as usual, and the comment startled me for a second. “Yes I know. I am trying my best” I mumbled. It was most definitely the longest winter I had ever spent in this lifetime, and the darkness had almost absorbed all of us. We were decaying. We needed to invent new ways to keep our brains sharp. So with the help of some charcoal, we started drawing a chessboard on the ground and started playing the great game.
The beginning was immensely difficult. He was doing better than me; he had a natural talent at these things. Mathematics, philosophy, hyper geometry; all those disciplines he was involved in the past with, helped him tremendously and made him extremely sharp. Sometimes he could remember entire sets, moves, and places of the pieces at a specific period in the game. It was like for every single moment he was taking snapshots of the board and stored them into memory so efficiently that could recall them anytime. Or maybe it was that all the time his brain was preoccupied with the game. For us it was crucial, it was paramount that we played, that we improved, that we evolved. We would have otherwise rotten.
The desperate search for her kids was bearing no fruits. And with each passing day, that hole in her chest, that emptiness grew bigger and hungrier, longing to devour more and more space. “You must keep faith. It is not going to last forever. At some point a ray of sunshine will come through one of those tiny splits, and our scouts will bring back the good news. And then you will be able to look for them, and you will find them. If we survived, then they must have too”. However, nothing was able to stop the tears from flowing. Sometimes it was a single teardrop, other times a waterfall, but always accompanied with a deep exasperated saudade; a word that represented much more than we could ever imagine. I asked her many times of the meaning, but she kept insisting it’s untranslatable. At times, words are useless, they hardly ever do justice to meaning and emotions, concepts and ideas. You must feel it to know it. You must experience the depths of it, in order to comprehend its nature. I didn’t keep up my attempts at cracking the meaning; instead I selected to try and feel it. I was certain as anyone wishes to be, that I felt saudade for the world that was once out there, full of potential, when the future seemed so bright and full of opportunities to accomplish and live all the things that resided only as thoughts in our heads. And now, not only I have that same longing for the world that was once there, but also for the one that hasn’t come yet to be. This simultaneous longing, this has to be the meaning of that whispered word.
Outside, the wind blew strong. Stronger than ever before.
Pure energy was flowing inside him. Every quiet passage of the wind prepared him for the next blast of energy, something that would take over his entire body in a blink of an eye. And that’s what he knew best, walking, losing the sense of Self with every step. The troubles wouldn’t stop, the were always present, appearing in almost predictable intervals of time. They were food for the witches and the shamans and the prophets and all the rest that could read the signs. But for him they were just opportunities to grow stronger, to have an impact on his environment, his loved ones, on future generations. He felt obliged to preserve and to sustain a balanced and harmonious way of life. To do so, he had to win first. And the only way to win was to fight. And fight he did. But soon, his powers wore down, the gigantic mass of the enemy was overwhelming for one man to handle. The resistance stood strong for a while. But when anger and frustration started to creep into the enemy’s mind like a shadow through the slits on the wall, their most destructive weapon was called. The giant serpent which was only part of the wildest imagination for generations, arose from the waters nearby. The size of a mountain, elusive like the waves melting into one another in perpetuity, strong as an army of ten thousand men. At the command of the enemy chief, it was ready to devour anything on its way in a matter of seconds. It was holding back though; it seemed unfair to unleash it, the victory would be unfair.
Nearly to the point of being oversensitive to the wishes of the wind, she could feel in every inch of her skin its milky touch, soft and tender as it blew gently, moving her hair to one direction or the other. In rain and in snow, in sunny mornings and winter storms, in unbearably hot summer days and breezy spring evenings, the thirst for freedom was greater than anything else. Sometimes leaning on the window of a crowded bus, pushed by others, feeling cornered, she would get a glimpse of the city life. In between those moments there were intervals where the fumes, the voices from the streets, the annoying horns and everything else would mix, violently intruding one another, disrupting the harmony yet strangely in symphony somehow. That is exactly when her eyes would get most clouded, her gaze would drift away as to being one with the birds travelling from place to place. She was captive too, in a dark cell that wasn’t any different from the thousands located inside each and every one of us. The desires of the family, the opinions of friends, the righteousness of society, those were her guards, always present and alert, highly trained and committed to the single task of not letting anyone escape ever again. ‘Our cage doesn’t have iron bars but something much stronger, invisible and unbreakable’ she once said, almost in an unconscious fashion. Nobody was truly listening. There are times when we get lost in moments of everyday life, in ashtrays and wine glasses, so dependent on the smile of others, so fearful of their rejection. It doesn’t take a whole lot of energy to sit there, to drift away, staring blankly at the rain. It came so naturally to her that made me full of such sweet jealousy whenever she would get lost in those places I only dreamed of going.
The Moment Collector 