i was coming back from a quick dip at the beach - blessed today by a beautiful coat of menacing grey clouds in the sky. i prayed, while floating on my back, for the exciting prospect of a rainstorm while bathing in the sea. not a drop of water came from the sky. i went home, eyes on the asphalt, unbothered by the cars passing by. it happens. sometimes i do not want to think about myself walking, or being. i came to my senses when i brushed my right shoulder against a patch of laurocerasus - razor-thin, shiny leaves. unsettling. the leaves awakened my senses and i brought my gaze upwards. it's the apartment we used to live in when i was little. i didn't use to think about death at all when i was a kid - most of what i knew about it i learned through dragon ball and its mythical colorful afterlife. i couldn't wait to die so that i, too, would run on an infinite, floating, snake-shaped road to my divine sensei. my first contact with death coincided with my first panic attack. i talked about it before, here - one day i was sure someone, or something, or the whole world was poisoning my food and drinks, and i felt it was the adamant truth for a good while. i turn my head to the western building. third floor. a reclined chair on the balcony. i was there, lying, bawling my eyes out, sure that the unnamed, extra-dangerous poison was flaking away at my central nervous system. and everything pointed to this: if not, why was my body shaking uncontrollably, why were my legs melting, why couldn't i see straight, why could i feel my neurons shrinking one by one, quickly reducing my existence to a puddle of pure nothing? after a few more attacks, a few more tribulations, a period of adjustment behind the walls of a simple, working-class family, i was sent to a psychologist, who rapidly tagged my episodes as, you already know it, panic attacks. from here, at my older age, everything is clear. revisiting that curly, rose-cheeked boy freaking out doesn't feel like a puzzle. this pynchonian, conspiracist layer i imposed upon my life feels like the natural result of a negation of death, and, as a mirror, of life. i lazily accepted death in the years after that, not as a concrete step along the path of anyone's life, but still as an abstract concept, albeit one cohabiting closer to my life. i knew it was around me, i just felt like it wasn't really my affair, just as i don't really concern myself with the P vs NP mathematical conjecture or how electricity really works. it was in the air, i knew it moved masses of bodies every year, i knew it was gonna happen, maybe, even to me; i didn't care at all. i could waste all the time i wanted. and i wasted a lot of it. i can go on and on about my lost time. fast forward; it was last year when i dreamed about my pile of bones. i don't dream often, and to cut it short i always say that i don't dream at all, because if you dream just two or three times a year it's like not dreaming at all. now it was clear, concrete, personal, in the first person. i'm hovering over my grave. it's a cartoonishly, perfectly square hole in an infinite green land. inside, my bones. they are also perfectly placed, and i can recognize my body. i can see my particular hips, and my larger collarbone. i can see a whole lot of defects and particularities that instantly feel obvious. i feel whole, but i also feel nothing. then a first sweep of wind comes. a few specks of sand land on my bones, and they move a little, they make a rattling sound. then, an even stronger wind, and rocks pierce through the bones, breaking them. now the wind is mixing and stirring the bones. my figure is unrecognizable. i'm freaking out and asking a god to make the wind stop. it does. he also gives me the possibility to come back down to earth, and reassemble the bones so that they resemble me. as the work is done, i wake up. i distinctly remember that i saw my own dead bones projected into the future. i saw myself dead, and it was real. death was real, and in uncertain proximity, for the first time in my life.
