Are You Alive?

# There comes a time when your whole world turns upside down. Your world is experiencing a violent earthquake. After him, you look among the ruins to gather and continue in the conventional direction—forward! You collect the puzzle named after you, piece by piece, moment by moment, stone by stone and sit down. You sit down to line up again. You are required to be precise, careful, accurate, because every incorrectly placed piece reflecting your personality is a pain, tears, memories that end with a sigh instead of your mysterious smile. You line up crookedly. Well done! You look almost believable. After such a rollover, you are never the same in front of yourself and others. Something in you breaks and breaks, changes drastically and goes to its oblivion. Something in you is born, developed and travels with all its might toward your own awareness and wisdom. Awareness and wisdom do not come when you are twenty, much less when you are twenty-five with your nose held high. They come after your silences. After the imposed silence, in which only you are your own companion. They come after two or three real slaps, whose physical sting fades in ten minutes, but you carry the memory of that gesture for a lifetime. They come after you have arranged so meticulously what you wanted others to notice about you that you forgot to conceal the sensitivity with which a pack of mercenary simpletons love to toy. Then comes the parade of all sorts of people who look like everyone else, yet are not themselves. Because they are afraid. Then comes the withdrawal into yourself, which brings you relief—both from the steam of the workweek and from the gnawing of envy. They arrive, like every morning, a pair of pigeons landing on your window ledge to regard you with curiosity and remind you that you have forgotten to leave them seeds and crumbs again. Then comes that full moon on which you cannot sleep, because you contemplate the silence of the night, you ask yourself countless questions. Questions that only you are desperate to answer. You answer them, you weep, but you are certain. A person—the only one who touches the core of who you are—comes to tell you that you have left something that troubles him. Finally, it arrives on your doorstep in the morning. You have no desire to speak. Silence for at least a year ahead. You brew your coffee and watch the clock’s hands moving relentlessly forward. After everything and everyone, after every sadness or joy, you are invariably left alone, faced with a choice: whether to embrace another day of your life, or to miss it. Missed days are not remembered, they pass inexorably and that’s it. We only remember those days that managed to excite us beyond the levels of any tolerance, shaking us with the question: “Are you alive, darling? I hug you!” There are days when a hug can save several lives.