All Of Those Voices

I looked...

I looked at the road above the driver's seat. The dark night extended into the distance and was completely black. The trip was supposed to be something that would distract me from the fact I was thinking. The dreams happened months ago and disappeared, but now they are coming back. Well, they were rather nightmares. I could still feel the cuts in my arms that appeared in the following mornings. The Shadows were supposed to help stop them since they led the government and had an unknown power. I remember this:

The ceiling was the color of lead. The floor, the color of the night. I sat up there forever in the time I had left. I could feel the hope seeping out of me in the fresh air of this height. Be eight floors from the ground. Maybe if I run along the edge of the building I'll fall, I'd better go down the stairs and take the subway. I was getting dark with the sun falling on the horizon closer the next day and I didn't want to see it now. Eight at night, the crowded subway in one of the most central stations in the city. The eccentric purchases, the end of the workday and the usual hustle and bustle of rush hours converge on the platforms waiting for the trains that return them between pushes and squeezes to the relative tranquility of their homes.

As one of those hard-heaved ants, who run in all directions, I try to dodge at full speed all those who get in the way that separates me from taking the link in time.

In my hands and squeezing it against my chest, I carry a folder from the last meeting of the afternoon, which lasted unexpectedly in a nearby cafeteria.

I'm about to go up the escalators to change lanes. There are only a few minutes left for the train to pass and increase the pace of my steps, raffling in my ascent all the clueless who have not yet learned that the left side must be left free for those who are more in a hurry than you. In my head there was only the obsession of arriving on time. Then and without being able to react, I take a shorter step than normal and stumble with the step, falling irretrievably to the ground and barely cushioning the blow with the hand that was left free.

A second is what it takes me to assimilate what has just happened to me, I slowly get up, I pick up the bad folder and proceed to get up hoping to find a supportive hand from another traveler. But when I didn't find it, I turned confused to contemplate with astonishment that there is no one else at the station, not a single soul, when only a second before it was full of people. I finally get up without understanding very well what had just happened, I turn around again and everyone is back to where I was before my fall. But with a difference, I realize that the one who is not there is me, but that I am invisible to the rest.

I don't know how to explain it, but it's as if I lived in a parallel reality, in a different frequency. It's like hearing a politician talking about thieves.

I live with the rest of the world on the same temporal space plane, but we belong to different realities, to worlds with totally opposing perceptions, so that if we were not separated, they would come into conflict causing destruction.

That's my loneliness. It is not a loneliness linked to the fable affective-loving relationships that arise between human beings and that manifests itself in the fear of not finding that person who completes my shortcomings. It's not that, it's something less epidermal and more rational. It is the conviction that my lungs cannot withstand the heavy and overwhelming air of the environment; that my heart beats at a different pace from the rest, that my words and my understanding make up a strange and complex language that no one else can understand...

It's like living on an island in the middle of the desert, like a daisy that tries to grow among marrows or like a white shirt in the colored laundry.

I always have the hope that somewhere there will always be other islands, other daisies and other lonely shirts, who struggle not to be absorbed by their surroundings.