During These Days Of Pandemic

I cling to the last rays of the sun, I see them sneaking beyond the wall that overshadows the entire garden, between the mosque and the space reserved for the garbage. Terrible garbage-truck! Now basically a new habit, a necessary meditation like a glass of hot water that you always forget to drink.


A few handwritten pages in the morning. I'm thinking about Jibanananda, I'm thinking about Tagore. How they dreamed, what they wrote, what they thought, what smaller or bigger problems they had. How they felt the coolness of a morning, as they watched the wind moving the leaves of the trees. To have seen them from a distance, to have seen them working. And I'm doing this exercise that separates me from myself, it halves me in the best possible way. For the rest of the day, unfolds normally once I have left between the pages what in other times would have kept me awaken for several hours of the night. Tremulous is the thought that we may never be the same again.


Never like us as we met before the pandemic. Never natural in gestures, in audacity, in smiles. In our desire to see ourselves, to find each other. In asking for a simple, sugar-free strong coffee. Sitting at a table, under the shade of trees, without fear that anything bad might happen to us if we stay up late at night. In drinking one cup of coffee after another, cold, as it will begin to remain more and more only in memory. To be you and, in fact, to pretend to be you. To think not only before you say anything, but also before you move. Think twice before you leave the house. Think twice before planning your future.
Our gestures don't have much significance. Not as we see them today, hurry, through the dictionaries of our lives, translated quickly and inadvertently.


With our petty gestures we won't be able to save the world, not if we can't synchronize what we want from life. We can't applaud different parts of the same show. We can't just admire some sculptures and loathe the artist. We imagine at the edge of an existence where nothing can touch us, in which pain is only a fantasy of our own, something that we once read about, as a dream, something that has no clear definition and no meaning. Interestingly, we always want to start over, to take seriously our role as demigods, as saviours of what we do not believe can be saved. But we try with a desperation of life and death in equal measure.


Those who lead us through the light are the same as those who drag us into the darkness. You can't love without feeling the fear that the heights give you, the irrational fear that a railing-free railing irrationally thrusts you into the growth. The fall seems imminent, but you regain your balance at the last minute, you recover in less than a second, you are back in control of your own, but especially on your own thoughts and you move away from the edge and vertigo. But it was almost. What we're tired of is what defines us more than we ever imagined.


Those moments that demand everything from us, those brief moments of enthusiasm that drain us are those fragments of life that compose and break us down. It's the dance we do with ourselves because we owe it to ourselves if we want to survive. And we want to survive. Despite the missteps, we dance in the mirror with the light on in the room behind us. No one sees us, we dance unhindered, free, with music of our own. This dance that frees us, transforms us, rejuvenates us. Dance, misunderstood by others, but essential, vital to us.


I'm not going to repeat myself. We are never the ones who wake up in the morning, but we manage to make some mistakes that others cannot forgive more than once. So I'm not going to repeat myself, even if I manage to make the same number of mistakes many more times. But I'll be another, every time, clutching a Jibanananda that no one has ever met.

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During These Days Of Pandemic

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