Stories and News No. 1220
My name is Joseph, I’m from Guinea, I’m only coming but I don’t arrive, it will never happen, and this too was written. But not by me, never from me. I died, yet I am here, at six months. Six months from the shore that I left and from the one I only imagined. My last breath, the only consolation, left me while I rested in the arms of someone who has sought and found me, in spite of those who have in vain forgotten and erased me. Between Open Arms everything has gone, figuratively in the English meaning, and much more in the only interpretation that really matters, when the lights go out and you are alone inside you: humanly, an adverb now obsolete in the virtual vocabulary where the most clicked word is indifference. Nevertheless, the unspoken phrases at the moment that mattered, that is before, and the necessary and never performed actions when they would have really saved the rest of the story, they find space the same, six months after a dream called life that is such for everyone. Or so it should be. You know? It's worrying if you don't understand this simple concept, which is the premise of every being. This is what we would all like to be, at six months or at any other distance from the beginning as from the end: to be happy or even sometimes smiling, full and fulfilled, or relieved from time to time. That's what we all want on the first pages of our respective journey. And then it goes as it goes, but it should go beyond a handful of moments. Six months, I'm talking about this, do you understand me? You see me? And if you don't see me, much less understand me, can you hear me? You don't need ears and eyes, superfine intellect and years of study. Anyone who has a heart that still tolls in the silence of the chest, vibrating with the most usual breath in the world, should be able to perceive what it feels like six months from the possibility of crossing this unacceptable border. Well, in the case you should unexpectedly prove blind and deaf to such essentially of living, you must know that usually at the end of a life, as they tell in the novels or films that I will not read and never watch, it happens that all your experience run before your eyes. Well, six months before everything, even the mere ability to deliver the well-deserved farewell speech to the world, that time lasts a second, but in that instant it is like the explosion of the deadliest bomb you can imagine. The unspeakable anger of at least half of an entire planet explodes simultaneously. No, you're not the only one screaming in that damn moment. The incalculable grief of billions of families whose future is reduced to ashes with a surgical systematic merges into a single unheard-of lament. No, you're not the only one crying on that damn day. And the burning regret for every missed second for every missed life, that wins over the infinity you have known so far, is concentrated in a deafening fist on the altar of morality which you claim to kneel to. No, you’re not the only one to protest even in that unfortunate moment. Now let me finish while I still have time in your time. I'll be concise, because brevity is the only condition I know of. The space granted between one traveling companion and another in a vessel of bad luck, more than the other way around. The amount of expectations on arrival and beyond. Here, even beyond is a bold and dangerous word, because you cannot delude yourself when you know that even six months after the most normal life you risk of stopping. My name is Joseph, I was born in Africa in the country called Guinea. But now it is as if all of this never happened. Nearly. For a hair. A few miles from the promised land to everyone, as it was in the pacts never respected by a single overrated species. A breath from any possibility, day, hour, even the most insignificant and trivial, negligible juncture at any latitude. Six months away from everything and everyone. Nobody feels far enough away from me, six months away from you.
My new book: A morte i razzisti (Death to racists)