The Vast Ending

I don’t know how it happened, but one night, before the Sun came out, or maybe it was midday, I found myself walking along a series of ceaseless Borgesian forking paths. I have not been able to come out from there since. The walls that flank the paths are three times my height; I can’t see to one side or another, just to the front and the back; the pink and violet skies above my head give away an ever-setting Sun. Night will never come, and I need to sleep.

I keep walking, conscious of each one of my steps, knowing that I don’t want to turn back on them, knowing that I don’t want to take the wrong turns again, conscious that the only way to find the exit is to keep walking.

I want to meet him. At times, even with my sight fixed on the path, I am thinking only about him. He told me to stay on these roads; that we will meet, someday… It’s the most beautiful song I have ever heard. I was nineteen, and my boyfriend dedicated it to me. Absurd. Why would you, if you’re dating someone, dedicate a song to them about two people who haven’t met yet but are destined to? I didn’t mention my doubts to my boyfriend, but instead I secretly walked and wished he would find me.

The path continues, and the corners follow one after another, and sometimes I reach a dead end and I have to walk back on my own steps, full of uncertainties and hesitation. Then I notice that that’s the only way to get to the path that I should have chosen to begin with: beautiful, open and full of light, sometimes even with colourful flowers or amazing designs done on the stone walls.

When I’m walking down the wrong path, by contrast, I have to get spider webs off me, or walk over mud, and sometimes even end up in total darkness.

The search started, actually, when my boyfriend dedicated that song to me, I don’t know how many years ago now. It all started because I don’t know what human skin is. I don’t know what a heartbeat is like. I don’t comprehend substances, carbons or oxygen and hydrogen. All I know is that for years I was paralysed at the mere thought of contact, and that now I don’t feel anything. Because an orgasm is a static moment in the air, and as it dissipates when I zip my trousers again, then I am left with nothingness after each encounter.

Sometimes the paths trifurcate, and then my doubt is absolute. Every time I make a choice I wish fervently and ask the gods for it to be the right one.

I am left with nothing after each encounter because every time I make contact my dream to study in London dissolves even more.

…Why is it that sometimes I lose the sounds and only the static remains, but not as an explosion of pleasure, but rather as secretions of a stigmatized reality?

During those moments when the world turns around me, when my sight goes dark and the hole in my stomach makes me falter, ho paura, there is no going back.

My feet drag on the stones, and I try to keep my eyes open in case he appears. I know he’s waiting for me, and I need to get to London because that’s where he is. I feel as if the walls have become tighter, I feel my heels screaming.

That’s because I’ve not been with too many, but enough to mean something.

I realised this last night, or this morning, from which I haven’t been able to wake up at all, while I came home at 4:27 carrying my high heels in my hands so as not to wake my parents up, going over my mistake of ending up parked out by the shooting range with a married man.

The static explosions weren’t enough anymore, and the corridors get narrower and narrower, and the darkness lets in nothing but a single photon that I simply cannot reach.

I suppose I died.

I close my eyes and walk half-guessing, the roughness of the rock under my fingertips, my feet slipping here and there, humidity invading my lungs.

London gets farther and farther away. I feel new ground underneath my feet.

When light returns to my eyelids, I realise I’ve been reborn.

~*~

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