Those who slept forever

Part 1 - Never alone

Dreaming is an art. 

There are those who welcome sleep as one does with a long-desired lover, those who shun it like a thief who steals time for much more precious matters, and those who are simply terrified of it. Well, I am one of these. 

My story takes place in a very specific time and place, but it is not bound to these. The way in which what happened to me happened and I lived what I lived is only mine, but it is nothing more than the most superficial layer of a discovery that would have destroyed my life. I was not ready for that journey, although I had convinced myself otherwise, and neither were my traveling companions. On this point, in the end, we had to agree. 

We were naive, ignorant, and presumptuous, a lethal combination for those like us who were hungry for knowledge. But who am I trying to convince? We did not do this or that driven by altruism, nor to share our discoveries with the world. We were alone and scared, reckless and instead of accepting our condition and moving on we investigated again and again, until we consumed ourselves. 

The sight has become weak and the light of a computer screen causes me dizziness and nausea. However, I have enough energy to hold a pencil and leave my last words to whoever Grace will determine to be the recipient. What follows is my personal testimony, but I also managed to collect the surviving pages of the diaries of my traveling companions, my dearest friends who have long been lost or, as I am about to do, have died. 

We were not the first ones destiny put to the test and not even the first to fail. Of course, this does not alleviate the pain for the missed opportunity and for the many lives that our arrogance has broken. I grew up in a small provincial town in northern Italy. A rather ordinary adolescence: the friends of the oratory, the smell of manure that accompanied the fertilization of the fields in spring, the teachers with tortoiseshell glasses, the fights at the station at lunchtime, and the watered-down cocktails in the downtown bars. 

Unlike my peers, however, who suffered the loneliness of adolescence, I was not alone. An inseparable companion had watched over me since I can remember, even though I did not know then that she had a name. 

I have tried several times to describe to doctors, my family, and my friends, what I felt when Tourette's syndrome knocked and forced me to make those gestures and say certain words. I said "I feel unglued" off the cuff, later I would have realized that I could not have used a more fitting metaphor. I and my future companions were unglued from this reality, it did not belong to us. Other lives we would have lived and many others we would have broken. 

This is our story."