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.
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The Moment Collector 