Anecdotes

“Conversations, in those circumstances in which I might be asked or invited to join a small crowd of people, somewhere and somewhen, always intimidated me.
I used to conduct a quite retired kind of life, like a hermit, detesting it all the time, yet struggling at finding the motivation to go out and see the world.
I used to live a life in my head, you have to know.
Conversations always intimidated me, I was saying.
Listening to those people tell about their life, their deeds, by means of anecdotes, like doors in a baroque palace opening one after the other, each one leading to a room completely different from any previous other for colours, styles, materials, decors, furniture, was as estranging as hearing the recounts of aliens telling about their civilization and culture, completely diff…

Ah, what am I doing, now?
I’m holding a pen, with my hand, and a sheet of paper has his superficial layers being permanently soaked and embued with blue ink… I am altering, forever, the matter of the universe, leading it to from state to state, starting with that in which the sheet was blank, to the actual one, in which a number of lines rests, crystallised, on the slightly rough surface, and this sequence of states is absolutely irreversible, no matter what I do to the sheet.
Am I supposed to provoke such an impactful change on nothing less than that one universe enclosing all the space, all the time, all the planets and the stars with all the eyes watching them, nose up, and all the hearts dreaming on them, am I even allowed to change all this for a saltless lie said for just my own, miserable convenience?

That’s why I could have never joined their club by artfully recounting them one, ten, hundreds, thousands of my never-lived anecdotes… was I supposed to instill in their lives the knowledge of events and circumstances which weren’t true? What if they had been affected by those suggestions in a wrong way? And why, then, influencing their knowledge of life, of the universe, with a bunch of illusions?
Admitting that they might even believe me, of course: what if some detail had contradicted another, or what if an uncertainty in my voice had betrayed me and made my disguise fall?

Lies.
Terrible, unforgiving lies.
Opposingly to their stills of life, feeling so real and authentic, so vivid, so truly lived.
It’s only partially true, actually, that those anecdotes seemed alien to me.
Oh, how close they sounded, instead!
As if, somehow, if only I had wanted it enough, if only I had dared enough, I could have touched them, and grab them and wear them like those superheroes costumes able to make you believe, for just a second, that you too are powerful, and live them, and call them my own, moments of my life I actually had lived and experienced and felt.

If only I had wanted it enough.
If only I had dared enough.
That’s why I used to listen away, or to even leave: in order to choose, just when I could have changed everything, to rather go back home, in my comfortable realm of unavoidable decay and loss, disguised as perpetual stillness, wondering where I could have ever lost it, that wanting, that daring.”

(c) Daniele Bergamini @danbergam

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