ICARUS' SUNSET

ICARUS' SUNSET - Chapter 1

THE MATCH BOX 

Ten-thirty PM, Friday. Forty-five minutes after the second half, I rely now on the referee's extra time. I keep on smoking. Some people say it holds loneliness at bay. I watch as the blue flame burns the wood of a matchbox, which perhaps in ancient times had been part of the Druids' sacred oak tree. The flame flutters before death. I shiver and dread. I'm afraid of the sun. I fear being sucked into its Eternal Light.

Leaning on my windowsill, I watch the hectic life going on eight floors below. A procession of cars slides on the asphalt like a serpent. The eyes made of iodine headlights turns human heat into ice. There were times when those shimmering lights exerted an almost magical power over me, some sort of hypnotic force. However, those days are gone, like the old skin the serpent leaves behind.

Oniric images from a distant past hammer my brain with the zeal and insistence of a blacksmith hooked on work. My brain is a blazing anvil. Sparks fly out of it as the hammer comes down repeatedly.

– Are you afraid of Infinity?

Again, the same question haunts me. It echoes in the atrium of the cathedrals of gnostic conscience and comes to my ears carried by the wind of wisdom. It brings the smell of primordial horror. The question translates into the baaing of the sheep that jumps over the fence of the corral of ignorance and ventures on the dangerous and exciting fields of the unknown.

With smoke in my eyes, I walk through a tube made of paper. Not very far behind me I hear the sound of the wood twisting and cracking in the fire. Without looking back, I keep on running. I run alone a one man's race.

– Help!

My heart bursts out of my chest and is projected into space dragging my soul at one hundred twenty beats per minute. Now, I'm just a cellophane kite dancing through the lightning in a stormy night, tied to a flimsy silver string. I can hardly hear the desperate shouting of the boy down there:

– Help!

She was sitting next to me on a cement bench somewhere on Copacabana Beach promenade. She looked through the curtain of her black hair and watched the sea. Her lips just whispered as if to herself:

– Are you afraid of Infinity?

I was at a loss for words at first. I was usually perplexed about the way she asked me such unexpected questions. My rhetoric was instantly turned into saliva as it desperately drafted down the river of my tongue towards the silent waterfall of my throat.

– I sometimes get this strange feeling when I watch the ocean...

– A feeling of power? – I asked as I did not know what to say.

– Not really. It's more like a mix of loneliness and nostalgia. It's as if I missed something in life. This vastness of the sea actually oppresses me, though paradoxically it also attracts me. You know what I mean? Are you afraid of Infinity?

By then it was four-thirty P.M of the most memorable day of my entire life. During the ten hours or so that followed that encounter I became even closer to my twin soul. She inhabited the beautiful, slim, agile and elegant body of a woman in her early thirties, whose eyes were full of wisdom and sympathy.

– In what sense? You mean Infinity in terms of physical matter or anti-matter? – I asked.

The question came out of my mouth without my realizing it. My body felt like a dam full of words about to collapse. My superego was a superhero boy who's stuck his little finger right into the hole in the dam wall, hoping in vain that would prevent the whole city of rationality to drown in a mighty flood of dream and poetry.

She looked at me and gave me a smile of complicity:

– Do you believe in parallel worlds?

– Of course! – I said, trying to sound convincing – Why? Does that surprise you?

– I don't know. I mean, you sometimes sound so Cartesian, so Freudian and not Jungian at all. See what I mean?

– Not quite – I said in disbelief.

I expected her to give me some sort of hint, something I could cling on to, like a shield, so I could expose myself without fear.

– You mean I don't look like a hippy who believes in gnomes? – I asked with a scornful smile.

– No! I didn't mean that! – She said, frowning at me – Man! People always get me wrong! Or maybe it's my fault and I can never make myself clear.

– Sorry. I was just being defensive. Everybody seems to think I look like a stoner. Maybe it's because of my hair – I said, appeasingly, in an attempt to avoid at all costs any sort of misunderstanding between me and that goddes sitting next to me.

– Good to know you believe in that. It makes me happy, you know? These days, it's so hard to find someone who can see beyond the material world. I hardly believed it myself until I found you.

Right at that moment, while sitting in the open-air living room uptown and watching the sunset, our eyes gazed at each other for what seemed like an eternity, for the first time allowing themselves to be carried away by our feelings. I felt like a castaway who finally reaches land. However, I hardly suspected that I was going to lose her just like we met: suddenly.

In a flash of a second, the kite string came to an end and the boy started to pull it back more and more quickly. My whole body quivered and, before I knew it, I was back in my bedroom.

The burning cigarette still lay on the star-shaped crystal ashtray. I rescued it from self-combustion. All form of light has a practical and philosophical use and meaning in the dark.