Tornado III: Dust

The wreckage, the chunks, the torn pieces, the ripped pages floating in puddles. Rubble, sunken fires, ruins barely standing, like thin, tired legs. Soaked drawings, ink swimming away. I was expecting it all just like it all seemed to have been expecting me. It really isn’t worth describing. Anybody could guess what the aftermath of a tornado looks like. There’s something, though, that perhaps you, like me, couldn’t imagine. Something unbothered by gravity. It was in the air, in the water, around hair, inside my ears, on the books that had survived. And that was dust. So much dust. All of it. Nothing and no one could have warned me. I’m talking tons of minced matter. The tiniest lil bits of every single thing, no longer recognisable. And let me tell you, it takes a while for dust to settle. 

Through the dusty fog I was living in I’d sneeze and cry uncontrollably. I couldn’t see where I was, so I started to wander around with my arms stretched ahead, my hands trying to reach a hug, perhaps a door handle. I bumped into all sorts of things, like zombies do. Lost friends, rocks, coffee tables, retaining walls, spiky bushes, a doctor. The doctor said I had a bad case of dust allergy. I carried on dragging myself, trying to squint around. Time in semi blindness was piercingly slow, so slow, prickly slow. I can’t remember having slept or eaten for as long as the dusty smog lasted so I don’t really know how I made it through. I only remember that one day I started to vaguely recognise my surroundings. I seemed to be home, finally.

But home wasn’t looking like home. It was kind of empty and towers of boxes were piled up. I rubbed my itchy, crying eyes. Among the boxes, a pink one stood out through the smog. It had to be Hetty’s box. Hetty is the commercial name of my vacuum cleaner. That appliance, like me, has a few spins on her back. She’s sturdy and pink, with the shape of a head under a black hat. She’s also got two smiley eyes and a long nose, which happens to be the tube through which she sucks the dirt. I clumsily unpacked her and started to vacuum the air. The dusty fog was clearing up at last. I saw some movement at the top of a box tower. It was Momo, my cat! He must have been hiding inside a box while the tornado went on. You know cats. He jumped down from the very top and I finally reached my hug. He was looking cuter and more loving than before but he’d sneeze and cry, like me, as if he were also suffering from some allergy. I vacuumed our way to the vet. It turned out Momo had the same allergies I had: grass, olive trees, cats, dust… He wasn’t really tested for cats but I bet Momo is allergic to cats too. Well, now I really had to keep all that dust away from home, so I kept vacuuming even more hectically, sucking the hell out of every single thing and out of the empty space in between. 

Believe me if I say cleaning after a tornado is not an easy task. I bumped into an old friend who insisted on giving me a hand. We happened to be humming the same song. It was a sad one, a good one. I accepted his help, not because I thought I couldn’t do it myself, but because I just liked humming along with him. Hetty has wheels but he’d hold her for me while I vacuumed around so I didn't have to pull her from her nose. He’d also make sure her long cable didn’t get tangled. I still had to do the job, you know, but he made it easier. I think he knew what he was doing. All his T-shirts are stained with bleach. I suspect he’s a compulsive cleaner and you know compulsive cleaners like a good mess. 

For months I vacuumed and vacuumed frantically. Sometimes, little screws and hair pins were sucked from the floor. For some reason they would make this coin-falling-in-jar noise. I vacuumed my books, I vacuumed my pencil case, I vacuumed Momo’s bed and the lamp with the shape of Hello Kitty’s head. I vacuumed the space between myself and the mirror. God I was so thin. I vacuumed sofas and magazines, curtains, shoe soles and laces, clock hands. I vacuumed my way to the allergy doctor and my way to the supermarket. My way to the film club and my way to the rubbish container. I’d vacuum my chalkboard whenever I couldn’t think of what to vacuum anymore. I would smoke a cigarette and vacuum the smoke as I exhaled. Several feathers came out but I also vacuumed the duster once, just to rejoice in satisfaction. I was truly succeeding in keeping it all clear. Stroke by stroke, I was regaining my sharp sight, erasing all traces of the tornado so home could be a safe place for Moms and me, free of dust. 

Then it happened. It happened one morning, before putting Hetty to work. I suddenly thought to myself, ‘The vacuum bag must be pretty full by now, it’s time to take Hetty’s hat off and change it.’ I kneeled down, pulled Hetty’s ears, lifted her hat and… 

Pow!

A mushroom cloud, a dense grey explosion, a rising tongue of fine allergenic matter made its way up to my nose, my eyes, my mouth. The whole of my face, covered by a radioactive slap. My lashes, white. My brows, white. My long hair dry-shampooed from roots to ends by dust. All that dust, all that bloody dust that I had so carefully picked up and put away, all spat up my respiratory tract. My eyes were closed and I counted till three. Not with numbers, but with f*cks. F*ck. F*ck. F*ck. 

And I sneeeeeeeeeezed, just began to sneeze, coughing, sneezing nonstop, crying with itch and coughing my life out. Man. What the hell had just happened?

I was a ghost, a sneezing, crying apparition. And I had had enough. I turned to Momo and he ran in a coughing panic. I turned to my old friend. 

‘Holy shit. You alright?’ he said. 

‘Pointless!!’ I bursted. ‘All my hard -choo work, pointless. Achoo. All the suffering I tried to a- achoo- void, coming back to me, cough, cough, cough, exponentially multiplied.’ The interruptions were deducting drama from my rant, but I think the itchy crying was balancing it out. ‘Why this punishment aft, aft aftchoo after having survived a fu a fu a choo cking tornado?’ I pointed at the ceiling in anger. ‘Hadn’t I cough cough suffered en, en, en… enough? Why this now? Cough Why this? Cough, cough Why? Cough Why? Cough, cough, cough Why?...’ 

I entered a rhetorical loop of laments. The dusty fog was denser than ever. I was blind again. It was just my crying, my sneezing, my coughing, my desperate need for an explanation. An explanation that could at least ease the pain of living in a world where tornadoes can just come and wipe your home and leave it all ruined and full of dust and on top of that one can be allergic to dust and even cats can be allergic to dust, and you push through and put the energy you haven’t got anymore into clean it all up with an anthropomorphised vacuum cleaner and then you clean it and you’re thoughtful enough to change the bag and all the minced crap you put away suddenly goes back straight into your face in half a second and you’re back to zero and about to have an anaphylactic shock and who knows perhaps die unfairly, just like that, just like that, just like that. Without any reason. An explanation that would at least, no matter how cruel, no matter how complex, make it make sense. An explanation that would bloody hand me back some dignity, some agency from fate. The agency that only knowledge, only reason can give. The bloody cause of the effect, so I could at least know what to do or not do to avoid ending up in anaphylactic shock again! If I happened to survive this one! F*cking hell! 

‘Tell me, mate. You, my old friend. For pity. Tell me why!’ And like a powdered courtesan in the XVIII century after having read too much Voltaire, I wobbled and fainted. 

A folk tune from pre-revolutionary Russia woke me up. ‘Shit, the Russians!’ I screamed. 

‘Hey, yo, chill.’ 

I was buried in my friend’s couch. He was playing an old version of Tetris at light speed and idly smoking a blunt, all at the same time. There wasn’t a single speck of dust around. His coffee table was shiny-clean and the whitest double-bagged cup of tea was on it. 

‘That’s for you,’ he said. 

‘Thanks, mate.’ 

I wasn’t sneezing or coughing or crying anymore, just feeling a bit like Goldilocks at the three bears’ cottage. I had a sip. It tasted so comforting… 

‘Where’s Moms? Where’s Hetty?’ 

‘They’re at your place. They’re both fine.’ He sounded so reassuring…

Half the joint in his mouth was a perfect tube of ash, miraculously holding. 

‘You’re going to drop that ash and stain this immaculate haven.’ 

‘Shit!’ Tetris was going badly. He’d misdropped a long bar and a tower of Zs quickly piled up at the centre of the screen. ‘Sorry, what’d you say?’ He shook the bud above the ashtray. Not a fleck of ash flew away. 

I had a look around. ‘How… how do you manage to keep your place this clean?’ 

‘It’s not that clean.’ 

‘No, seriously. How do you do it? You don’t even have a vacuum cleaner.’ 

‘I don’t need one.’ 

‘You don’t need one. You’re taking the piss right now.’ 

He arched his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘I’m not.’ 

I frowned. ‘But you’ve seen how much dust is out there and how much I’ve had to clean just to keep my place breathable and in here it’s like being in a soap bubble. Why is that?’ 

He had a puff while staring at me intensely. 

‘You’re definitely hiding something from me,’ I said. 

He laughed the funny way only weed-smokers do. ‘I just clean before it gets too messy.’ 

There was a long silence. ‘I need to know why.’ 

His smile faded away. ‘I know you do.’ 

‘Why all that happened to me, you know?’ 

‘I know.’. He kept scanning me from behind the smoke. His eyes were the blue of a window-cleaning liquid. 

‘You know I need to know why or you actually know why?’ 

‘Both.’ 

He took another long puff and, holding the air in, said, ‘When you fell asleep I had a look inside Hetty. There was no bag. All the dirt you vacuumed was just stored directly inside, with no filter to contain it. There was a lot of dust bottled up so when you opened her hat, it exploded.’ He said all that before exhaling. 

‘Wait. I always change the bag. It makes no sense!’ 

‘It does.’ He now released the smoke. ‘Whoever shipped your boxes from wherever it was must have thought you don’t ship a vacuum cleaner full of dirt and they removed the bag. It was actually a thoughtful gesture. Why would anyone want to receive dust sent from miles away?´

There was no bag…  That coin-falling-in-a-jar noise suddenly made sense. ‘Shit. Is that it?’ 

‘Yep.’

I didn't know if it was the weed combustion or the simple logic behind my friend’s explanation, but I was starting to feel stunned. ‘Hold on. But why all the dust? And why am I allergic to it? And why is Moms too? And why was all my stuff in boxes? And why is home now miles away from where it used to be? The tornado. Why did it come!?’ 

‘It was meant to. Warm air down, cool air up. A supercell thunderstorm above… I mean, they said it’d come. Didn't you watch the forecast?’ 

‘I don’t own a TV,’ I whispered, lost in space. 

‘It’s just the natural result of explosive storms, cold temperatures, erosion, excessive hygiene and wind.’ 

Another long silence. This one must have lasted a really long time because the joint was almost over when my gaze came back from some black hole. 

‘Just that?’ 

‘Just that, mate,’ he smiled. 

In a way I was relieved, but I felt deeply stupid as well. I couldn’t believe the causes of all the pain I had gone through were so simple and yet somehow unavoidable. ‘Excessive hygiene…’ I whispered to myself. 

My friend put out the joint, creating the minimal amount of ash in the ashtray. ‘You’re some sort of control freak. You want to know the cause of everything because you think that way you’ll be in control. You can vacuum the air if you want, and I’ll help you if that makes you feel safe, but even if there are causes for a tornado, you can’t avoid a tornado, girl. You’ve gone through a storm. That’d be the definition of hell for any control freak. You’re traumatised. You need to feel sheltered. But remember, you’ve survived out there. You’re very much capable of protecting yourself.’ 

For the first time in ages I teared up not because of my dust allergy. 

‘Yo, the tornado is over now and it’s more or less clean here, right?’ He grabbed the joystick. 

‘I’m a control freak…’ 

‘So what? There’s nothing wrong with it.’ He pressed the ‘new game’ button.

The Russian melody was going on again in the background but he started humming over it. ‘Come as you are. As you were…’ At that point I was completely lost in a distant galaxy of thoughts. So in this world a tiny wind swirl could trigger a tornado, a sand storm, an outcome completely different to the one that was predicted just seconds before. Tiny wind swirls can go unnoticed. But even if unnoticed, they are still the cause of the outcome, because there is a cause for everything in this world. ‘Take your time, hurry up…’ But even if we noticed the causes, it might be that there’s nothing we could do to prevent the effects. In this world there are tornados for a reason. And there’s dust for a reason. And for a reason dust makes me cry and itch and sneeze and cough and also for a reason I can’t fully get rid of it. And that’s how the world is. And if the world weren’t like this, perhaps I wouldn’t even be in it. ‘Choice is yours, don't be late…’  I take it. It’s fine. I take the world as it is. I joined in after the chorus. ‘Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach…’ 

‘Don’t you want to break away from fate?’ My friend handed me the joystick with a smirk. ‘From the unavoidable fate of losing to me at Tetris?’ 

‘I’m a drama queen, a traumatised control freak, some delusional relic from the Enlightenment and an idiot. Why do you put up with me?’ 

‘Cause we’re playing and it’s your turn and you don’t always want to know the reasons for some things.’

Tornado II: The Shoreless Island

A tune was fading out. It sounded a lot like the ending of Good Vibrations but I couldn't be sure. I felt a carpeted floor under me. I smelled dust, soap and a pencil case I had when I was nine. A sneeze forced my eyes open. All my books were nicely placed on shelves and a lamp in the shape of Hello Kitty's head was on the mantelpiece.

'Good morning, grasshopper.' A curly-haired woman in the lotus position was smiling.

'Good morning, ma'am.'

Everything seemed to be there, peacefully perched in its place. Everything but me. 'Where am I?'

The woman reached for a bronze bowl, all smiles. 'You're on the shoreless island.'

'Oh, shit!'

I closed my eyes immediately and tried opening them again. It worked.

A rainy sky was stirring above me without a single drop of water falling. It was so hot... I turned my head to one side and saw a line of majestic linen trees. I turned it to the other side and saw Rosa, my best friend, lying on a picnic blanket next to me.

'Rat, where are we?' I said.

'I'm not here, but you are. Aren't I right?'

'What do you mean, you're not here!? Where's "here"!?'

A lightning bolt made me turn my head again and when I looked back at Rosa, she was gone. I sat up on the picnic blanket on my own. The smell of rain was so intense, the thunder was roaring, the clouds were misty and dark and shiny, but the grass was dry as hell. In the distance a squirrel seemed to be frantically running towards me. Then it stopped. Then it ran again. Then it stopped and ran and stopped and before I realized, it was too close to feel comfortable.

'I'm sorry, I have no cashew nuts on me.'

The squirrel gave me a defiant glance and started circling me, frowning and staring straight into my eyes.

'Ok, that's enough. Go away!' 

'Yo, chill. I'm burning my feet, I have to keep moving. Why are you getting all active?'

'Sorry, it's so hot. I shouldn't have said that.'

'Shouldn't?'

The squirrel raised an eyebrow and pulled its head back. 'You ok!?' it said, looking at me as if I definitely wasn't.

'Have you seen Rosa?'

'Yo, what's Rosa?'

'My friend.'

'The one who asked if she right?'

I nodded.

'Nah, she ain't made it here yet.'

'But why not?'

'But, mate, why why?'

The squirrel continued giving me the glance and jumping from the picnic blanket to the burning grass. The humidity was making the space between us look like some sort of butter.

'Is this a dream?'

'Nah. This no dream, mate. This the shoreless island.'

I was over the squirrel at this point.

'I'm not gassing, girl. Look.'

As the squirrel pointed up I saw an arrow of fire coming down straight towards me. I pressed my eyes closed and... it worked.

I was in a stone-paved street, sitting on a table about to eat a croquette. August and a waitress were there, having an argument. He was so agitated...

'Carmen, tell her, please. Explain it to her. Only you can make her understand.'

'What do you want me to say?'

'Just make her understand. She won't listen to me.'

'Understand what?'

'That this is all wrong.'

'What's wrong?'

August seemed to have turned into a statue. Not even the black of his popping eyes was moving anymore.

'Hey, hey, hey, August, look at me, what's wrong? What is the thing that's wrong?'

I was about to shake his shoulders but a bull as tall as me charged him and kicked him down the stone-paved street like a rag.

'Nothing is wrong,' the waitress said, 'here at the shoreless island.'

It felt as if my eyes stayed as wide open as August's, but I must have blinked.

Next thing I saw was a maze of canals surrounding me. A man with a striped T-shirt was wandering around, walking up and down, scratching his flat straw-ribboned hat as if he had lost something.

'Hi, I'm Carmen. Are you a gondolier?'

'No, I just really love this hat and happened to be wearing a striped shirt today.' He looked friendly and confused too. 'My name is Nigello.'

It's hard to explain how much he looked like a gondolier.

'Nigello, I need to get out of here. Will you help me out, please?'

He pulled a map from his pocket and began to unfold it. He unfolded it and unfolded it again. The map was expanding in every direction, sinking a bit in the canals.

'Do you need a hand?' I asked.

'It should be okay, just hop up a bit.'

I jumped and he slid the map under my feet. The thing was just starting to cover all the canals, the land in between and the horizon as far as I could see.

'Nigello, what type of map is this?'

'Oh, it's a map of this place, if I'm not mistaken.'

'Oh, thank God! We're saved.'

He gave me a sad look and carried on unfolding for a good while.

'Hey, Nigello. Since when have you been in this place?'

'What do you mean, "since"?'

The breeze under the map began to create waves.

'Never mind. What's the scale of this?'

'1:1.'

'Wait, what?'

As Nigello continued unfolding I looked down and saw I was standing on a big red dot with the words 'you are here' written around it.

'Problem with this map is it has no edges.'

Nigello scratched his hat again while leaning down to straighten a fold. I panicked.

'Listen, stop what you're doing, please,' I said.

'I'm trying to help.'

'I know, sorry. I'm just a bit all over the place.'

'Oh, no, you're right here,' he said, pointing at the red dot.

'Just tell me where's north, please.'

'What do you mean?' He looked even more puzzled than me now.

'North, the north on the map. Where is it?'

'There's no such thing.'

'South?' I asked in desperation. 'West? East?'

He shook his head.

The helplessness in his eyes was so genuine that I felt as bad for him as for myself. Then a gust of wind out of nowhere whipped his straw hat away at once.

'Shit! I'll get it.'

'No, Carmen, wait!'

I ran and ran after the hat as Nigello ran after me.

'Stop running, let it go!' he yelled.

But I just couldn't stand any of it anymore and only wanted to give the hat back to that kind man. I ran until I was out of breath. Nigello caught me when I was on the floor.

'Why didn't you let it go?'

'It's your hat. I could have caught it had I run faster. Damn!'

'No, you couldn't.'

'What do you mean, I couldn't? Had I run faster I could have...'

'No!' He shouted. 'You couldn't have possibly run faster!'

'How do you know that!?' I shouted back.

'Because you did not run faster, that's how I know. And you couldn't have possibly caught the hat anyway cause you didn't catch the hat.'

Nigello sat on the floor, defeated and hatless. He didn't have the gondolier look without it. There was something incredibly unfair about that and I started crying.

'Oh, Nigello. We are stuck here, aren't we?'

'Oh, Carmen, please don't cry.'

'Oh, shit, that means we are.'

'My hat might come back.'

I was crying so much I could barely talk. 'How's it going to come back?'

'Well, if we can't go anywhere the hat can't go anywhere either. After all, we're on the shoreless island.'

I must have fallen asleep crying. When I woke up it was nighttime. The sky was clear apart from a single star, flaring in its simplicity, pure, like a drop of cream poured in an infinite dark coffee. I looked around but couldn't find any trace of Nigello. There was a small building in the distance, though. It had big, bay glass windows and a tiny light on. As I came closer I could read 'Metaphysical Library' on its sign next to a drawing of a star.

'Hi!' I said to someone behind the counter. A big fat book was covering their face and their whole upper body.

'Welcome to the Metaphysical Library. You can touch any book here but you can't touch anything they are about, ha, ha, ha.'

The library was packed and I was overwhelmed. Everything I'd ever been interested in had its own shelf from ceiling to floor. The subtle beauty of a dancer's arm, the coexistence of joy and decay in autumn in cities, the golden ratio in toddlers' ringlets... I entered into a trance and can't say for how long I browsed there. It might have been hours or months.

A sneeze and a slight headache made me close a book of unsolved riddles and return to the counter.

'Amm... sorry, I was just wondering... do you have any maps at all? But, like, small ones.'

'Only things you can't touch, remember?' said the voice behind the big fat book.

'Okay,' I said with a smile.

And I was okay with that, in fact. I actually think that was the exact point where I gave up my hope of ever leaving that land and understood there was nowhere else to go. I was opening the library's door to leave when the person behind the counter suddenly asked, 'What do you want?' The thought of it made me smile.

'Oh, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter at all.'

'I know. But what do you want?'

I stood there holding the door open for a few seconds and really thought about the question. 'I think I only want to know where home is.'

The big fat book came down and for the first time I saw the bookseller. 'Oh, that's an easy one,' they said with bright eyes. 'Home is where your books are at.'

Just then, the library door gave me such a blow that I fainted before seeing who was entering.

'Gonnnnnng.'

I knew it was the gong of my master's bowl because it's the only sound I don't hear with my ears. And she was there, with her smile and her curly hair, sitting on the carpet in the lotus position, all my books around, nicely placed on shelves.

'Hi again, ma'am.'

'Hi, again.'

'Am I really on the shoreless island?'

'You tell me.'

I took a breath. 'Well, there's no north, south, east or west, no right or wrong, no since and no end. There's no could, shouldn't or had I, nothing else but what is and nowhere else outside it, no outside in fact and no edge. Lightning can strike you and bulls can knock you out. Rain might fall but not touch the ground and people might not be what they seem but you won't necessarily get to know why. Everything is known but it feels unknown and a tiny star might light up all darkness. You can't be anywhere but where you are, which is always "here". And if you lose something, no matter how unfair, you let it go.' I paused. 'So I guess, yes. This must be the shoreless island.'

The master widened her smile, stood up and with infinite delicacy walked to the door.

'Oh, and it doesn't matter what I want,' I added, just as she was about to leave.

She turned back. 'It doesn't. But what do you want, anyway?'

'I want to be home, ma'am.'

She bent down and whispered into my ear: 'You're lucky, then, grasshopper.'

The master patted my shoulder and left. I sat in silence until it was pitch dark. I got up to turn on the lamp with the shape of Hello Kitty's head but couldn't find it. I groped about on the mantelpiece until I realized something was covering the lamp. And when I finally turned it on, there it was, splendid and intact, on my mantelpiece, on top of Kitty's head, flat and ribboned: Nigello's hat.

Hunter's Island

Right. I've come to this island. It's called Hunter's Island. I was feeling adventurous after a long time of the same old same old. Also, I'm a forager and I wanted to see hunters. What the heck. How they live and all that. I just like to observe different people, you know? So I came from afar and started to look around: extensive savanna-like grounds, umbrella trees, hares, deer everywhere, buffalo and whatnot. A landscape fit for purpose. But in all truth, I'm having a hard time finding a single hunter out here.

You might be wondering: have you looked inside the caves? Hm-hm. I have. And yeah, they are all there. Most of them licking their wounds in the darkness. Chasing mice, starving, not wanting to ever go out into the wild again.

Trying to make sense of this no-hunt situation here on Hunter's Island, I've been yelling questions from the caves' entrances. My main one being, 'Hey, why don't you hunt?'

Some say it's not safe. Some say they're too old. Some say it's not fair out there. One hunter told me the problem was they couldn't control the way hares run – hares do what they want. Another told me it was just a lot of effort. Their muscles, made to sprint and to help up little hunters wanting to climb umbrella trees, are thinning out. I'm no hunter myself, in fact I'm a vegetarian, but this is sad to see, man. Not saying I'm an anthropologist either, but I observe these people complaining a lot. Other hunters do them wrong and they start mulling it over and stop teaming up with each other, they hide in those caves and don't look anybody in the eye. The little ones fall from the trees – they got no help or training you see – and they don't want to climb anymore, they don't want to try new tricks, give it another shot.

I'm noticing these hunters are trying to convince themselves the wild is not worth it. Again, I'm not on a mission here, I'm just an errant soul. In fact some conquistador blood might be still running down my veins, so I'd better be careful with what I do on this island because I don't want to alter the slightest bit. But I just can't help myself from telling them what happened to us, how we disappeared and that. Cause it all started when we decided that whatever we didn't dare to do wasn't worth it, when partnering with other foragers wasn't worth the pain, when befriending wolves wasn't worth the time, when we stopped sewing broken sacks, and wouldn't change our routes, when we began to pluck more and bend less, when we couldn't be arsed to explore other islands. And we would lie down at dusk and chew clumps of grass to trick our bellies and lower our stamina, our unburnt stamina, until it woke us up the next day. We called that unburnt energy all sorts of names and felt terribly sorry for ourselves until one day I looked around and realised you were all gone and I was the last forager.

At Hunter's Island they've forgotten hunters hunt, they've forgotten hunters live in the wild, help others, trust others and need to be trained. They've forgotten that in doing so wild things are inevitably going to happen. Hunters get hurt, and bleed and sometimes get hunted down too. For they are hunters. And it may not be fair, but this is nature, and justice is too small a word. You can't control the hare's movements, but you can try to improve yours.

Well, I've ended up sermonising to these poor hunters, bless them, and now I'm off to the next island. That's it for today, my fellow foragers watching over me from the stars. I carry your memory in my patched-up sack, alongside some raspberries.

A home with two rooms

A wise man left written on the back of a receipt that there are three things you simply cannot do in life. One is to get a waiter to see you before he decides to do so. Another is to defraud the phone company - if anyone is going to defraud it'll be them, not you. And the third is to go back home.

You might think, 'Bah, I can do that anytime,' but you must understand that by 'home' the wise man meant your original one and by 'go back' he referred to inhabiting that place like you used to. The house might still belong to your family, and if you're lucky, your parents might still be there. But once you leave, you just can't return. You can visit, at Christmas or in summer holidays, you can plant a tree in the back garden and help paint the fence, you can enjoy a Sunday roast or inherit the house itself. It doesn't matter what you do; you simply can't go back ever again. That home is gone, wiped from the face of the earth, swallowed by a tornado. It actually vanished behind your back shortly after the first time you left. Like me, you might be used to storms or other forms of desolation. The problem is, at times, some act as if that home still exists, even if it was long ago sold, even if those who were their family are strangers or dead. But even if the house stands, even if they are all alive, cordial and still there, the wise man knew nobody could go back home anyway.

You and I like to test sometimes if we could go mad and at the beginning of the plague we decided we would get lost for a good while. We succeeded. None of our friends could find us for more than a year. We hid, we read and we talked. We stared at the sea for countless hours, and swam, even when it was too cold to do so. We walked up and down the same hills and ate the same way over and over. Surprisingly, we didn't end up mad, but we did something worse: we went back home, when I knew we couldn't.

Let me tell you what happens when you do something you simply cannot do. It is a secret that only the wise man and I know. Imagine a wooden cuckoo clock the size of a deer's head hanging on the wall. You see it? Now, imagine you fold it and put it in your pocket. That's how it works: you act against natural laws and the door opens for strange things to happen to you and to life as you knew it. 

It wasn't an accident: unconsciously we chose it. It couldn't have been any other way. So we went back home, remember? We crossed the gates and found plants growing in the drought. There was a perfect meal coming out of an empty kitchen. There was a loving hug from a heartless mother. There was the most spectacular library gathered by a man that didn't read. The pictures on the wall either broke or broke us, so we put them away. The fruit was not for us to touch, but for the ants to spoil. The closet had no room for our clothes. Everything was mismatched and the boiler stopped boiling. There were many beds, and nowhere to sleep. Towels were carefully ironed but our records were unmercifully torn into pieces.

We had nothing, yet the trash kept piling up as some sort of multiplication miracle. We woke up every day unable to remember how we got there. Time spin-dried at 800 rpm, we must not change the washing program. We must not change anything, we must not be. But we were. Erased, frightened. And we were, there, until the day we didn't mind the ants or the cold water and managed to fill the kitchen and get our heads around the plants growing despite the drought. We were there until the day we didn't miss our records or our clothes. That day we looked at the man in his library and it made sense. The breaking pictures were not breaking us. We stayed until we understood that the heartless mother was just 11 years old.

We went back home and left again. We learnt we needed a room of one's own, so I made mine and you did the same. Now we know we don't have a home but that we are one. A home with two rooms. And life carried on, wider.

A leap of faith

Matt taught me the secret to love the damp, dark English winters. He's a calm, reliable guy, an inveterate optimist with a toddler with ringlets. Before getting married, he asked me to give him a hand with the groom's speech and I managed to convince him to say something nice about the bride. It wasn't easy because Matt doesn't talk about his feelings, but he did it in the end. He loves his wife very much, although it seems like she's not going to be waiting for him tomorrow, at the finish line. She thinks he's gone mad for wanting to run an ultramarathon. A 100km race through the countryside. One of the hardest athletic tests out there. 

Tomorrow is the big day and to my surprise he suddenly seems out of character, so neggy, nervous and scared. 'I'm going to be in so much pain... I won't be able to move the following day, my whole body will ache as I run.' I don't know what's gotten into him, or how his legs will respond tomorrow, but I haven't got the slightest doubt that he will run that 100km... can't explain why, but I know it. He says he'll let me know if he survives so I can offer his lesson to someone else in case he doesn't – Matt is a student of mine.

As per usual, as soon as my work ends, I forget it exists. This is supposed to be a good trait of mine, I guess... yet given how much I enjoy it, it seems a bit strange. Perhaps I have some sort of partition in my brain, like in the hard disc of a computer. Me from Tuesday to Friday, from 10am to 5pm; me the rest of the time. The rest of the time has been difficult to enjoy lately, though. Weekends have become Mondays and this weekend a heat wave has hit the coast, all the way up from Africa. They say high temperatures can drive some mad and turn good people into criminals. There are more murders in summer, in fact. One of them, many years ago, happened in a small village like this one, on a day when thermometers allegedly read 52 degrees. A farm worker and devoted worshipper of the Virgin of the Valley got so hot that he lost his mind and killed his entire family in a matter of seconds. I bet that once night fell and the temperature dropped he experienced the most terrifying human feeling: that of having done irreparable harm. I've never killed anybody but I know too well how an atmosphere can be maddening and I feel for that man. If time didn't work as it does and his family could have come back to life, I wonder if they could have forgiven him. I mean, it's a damn hard thing having someone kill you and then giving the man another chance, but maybe, because they felt that torrid heat too, they would have taken pity on him. Who knows?

And that's what was crossing my free-time brain when I suddenly got a message from Matt, as if one partition of the hard disc could send a message to the other: he had done it. He had run that bloody ultramarathon the same way he had spoken about his feelings at the wedding: overcoming the fear, daring, making a huge effort. 

Overcoming the fear, daring, making a huge effort.

That would have been the only way in which the resurrected family of the farm worker could have possibly forgiven. A leap of faith. And after that, it'd be up to the Virgin of the Valley. 

It is indeed the end of the world

It was the first time I had fallen asleep after my dad died. Right before I woke up there was this split second when you can't remember much and you don't know where you are. And then everything came to me, like a concrete plank. The world I was waking up to had changed for the rest of eternity: it was going to be emptier, it was going to be limping, for ever. I told someone that I hadn't been aware of how perfect my life had been until then. The truth was it hadn't been perfect at all; it was just that from then on it was going to be worse. Just that. The someone told me 'and you're not aware how perfect your life is now' and since that day, sometimes I've managed to believe he was right.

Today the concrete plank fell on me again after that liminal split second. There was no funeral to go this time, so I fed my cat, made a coffee and sat outside. The sun made me frown and the people walking carelessly down the street scratched me like only indifference can scratch the heart of an orphan. 

I believe that in order to live we humans need to have at least something we can take for granted. I should take me for granted: no matter the uncertainty, no matter how heavy the plank is, I'll be there, I'll still breathe. The problem is I can't find myself today, so heavy was the plank that I'm buried beneath. I'm under the ground actually as I'm writing this, next to my father.

If I were Sylvia Plath, I'd stare at the worms and see all the life that lies here too, in the deep soil. But I'm not her and don't want to be. Today I'm gouging out my poet's eyes and leaving them in the bedside table. If I could just disconnect all the sensors, all my receptors of pain and beauty, just for today... But the thing goes that if I miss today, I miss tomorrow as well. That's how this shitty game is.

So because there might be a tomorrow where I might think again that what the someone told me was right, I have to go through the pain of today. All for the promise of a better tomorrow. Until another plank smashes me again and so on and so on until one day I'm so achy that I don't care anymore about the promise of tomorrow and make peace with the fact that what has been has been enough. 

When I asked my dad when the end of the world would be he used to tell me 'the day one dies'. Well, it might have applied to him, but not to me. It is indeed the end of the world now and here I am, still breathing.

Acceptance

I have this habit of being hungry before I eat. No merit: it's an automatic habit. I, like my father, eat whatever is there. Leftovers, burnt edges, rotten bananas. I cut what's rotten, I eat the rest. No merit: that's what he taught me to do: to never, ever waste. Chilli wasn't around when I learned to eat, though. It came much later. And it keeps coming. But I was raised in such a place, in such a way, by such people that I could never adjust to it.

When I first went out to the big wide world, and travelled far away, chilli turned my eating-when-hungry habit into a struggle. Then I came back to where I was raised, but the big wide world was already here and chilly wasn't going anywhere. I'm hungry and I try to eat, but it hurts and the habit that once helped me to please my dad became a maladjustment to my present reality. 

I'm writing this because when you cook, sometimes you add chilli thinking that I won't notice, but I do. I'm hungry, the food you've cooked with so much care is in front of me, but it hurts. Then, for a short while, nothing makes sense. I can't understand why you'd do that, why sometimes it has to be this way. I get annoyed and frustrated. Then you say I'm ungrateful and you're right and I understand that once again you thought it was going to be mild, and I apologize. It's okay, you say. But it's not, cause you'll do it again. It's not, because you like it. You like chilli and I don't. You cooked and I didn't and you have every right to like and add chilli to everything you prepare. And I know deep down it's all me and my maladjustment.

I'm trying to change my ways so I can fit better into this reality where my dad is not around, but chilli is. Heaven knows I'm trying my very best. But I've hit a brick wall here because chilli might be edible, but it's not food, actually. And we have real food, you know? Like tomatoes and bananas, and my father taught me to feel grateful for having it and guilty for throwing it away. And that's what happens when I'm faced with precious food sprinkled with hot pepper powder: that goes to waste. I'm not sure I can or should adjust to chilli. 'Acceptance!' my new inner thunder voice says. 'Oh, c'mon! So now acceptance is about swallowing knives!?' my old whining voice replies.

Why can't acceptance be choosing food over firecrackers? Why can't the world ACCEPT ME for once and understand that I'm hungry and I just want to eat in peace? I don't want minced glass on my plate. I don't need a sensorial roller coaster when I'm hungry. Enough roller coasters I've already been served in this life. Isn't acceptance to simply admit I'm late to the chilli-lovers party!?'

'You are not late. Others made you late. You're still on time,' the new voice says.

'I don't want to be on time! Can't you see I don't even want to be at that party?' 

'Fair enough,' the acceptance voice says.

'Sorry, what?' 

'Don't eat chilli ever again, if that's what you want.'

'Yes!' I say

'Fine.'

'Hold on a second, how do I do that?'

'By making a habit out of cooking for yourself. That way you'll make sure hunger doesn't ever catch you in front of a chilli-flavoured meal.'

'But I don't cook on weekdays!' my old whining voice strikes again.

'So you are demanding from others what you don't care to give to yourself? I thought we'd already been through this...' my new acceptance voice fades away in a sigh.

'Shite!' 

So, I guess I'll have to cook daily now. This acceptance thing sure comes at a price.

'Hey! Don't you mistake me for Resignation!' the thunder voice roars back. 'I'm not good or bad, I'm not south or north, I have no shores. I am just what I am.' 

'Got it.'

'You sure?'

'Mhm.'

'Okay, now you know your choices: occasional chilli without complaints or complaint-free daily cooking. And remember: you're not what you feel. You can control it. Bye for now, then.'

You know what, chilli eaters? I love you and I won't stop you from chewing firecrackers because I know roller coasters can be fun. I know it because my dad used to love them. I think of you, dad. I'm a bit like you, dad. You live in me, dad. But I'm going to try my best to handle life even better than you from now on. 

Guilty consciousness

Yesterday, I swam for the first time this year. When I got in, the water was freezing and that was to be expected. The news is that for once I didn't mind the cold. You heard me well. I dealt with the cold like I deal with thoughts nowadays: like things that come and go. I went ahead, shivering. Then the water became warm and then it became cold again and I stayed.

I live next to the sea, a noisy road and a brothel. The brothel is called Sloop and you can see mops and children's clothes hanging at the back of the building. It used to make me sad. I also live next to a 40-metre pine tree. If the pine were to fall, it could destroy this house. It used to worry me, but I see there's not much I can do about it now. I’ve always loved that pine anyway.

Every day I close my eyes and try not to think. Sometimes I pay attention to my toes, sometimes to the heavenly chirping coming from the tree. When I do that, thoughts come and go: random things that were in my mind before I closed my eyes. Sometimes, I try to focus on my breathing since it’s the only thing that happens all the time. But that doesn't work and I have to go back to my toes or the sounds from the birds or from big exhaust pipes on the busy road.

My breathing scares the hell out of me. I feel a piercing pressure on my chest when I become aware of how fragile the mechanism that keeps me alive is. As if I suddenly realised I'm walking on the edge of a cliff, wearing a pair of clown shoes and holding a stupid cocktail glass. I feel reckless for going about breathing as if nothing, guilty for not taking more care of it. I don't know if anyone else feels guilty about breathing and, as with the pine falling, I don't know if there's anything I can do about it. It's very possible I'm writing this to figure it out.

I’ve noticed my mind brings and carries away all sorts of feelings and thoughts. All the time, pretty much, unless I manage to pay attention to the sea, birds or exhaust pipes. Then it does it again, but this time I know what’s going on – I know it's just this funny old thing my mind does, and I go back to the sea, the pipes or the birdsong and start caring less and less about what my mind invites, cause it's not going to last.

The funny thing is that when I pay attention to chirping, sea or cars, they feel way more welcoming than any thought or shiver. But it's not really the birds or the cars or the sea that feels cozier. It's the person who pays attention to them. Well, not even her, cause she actually becomes irrelevant. Irrelevant in the best possible way, in the most overwhelming way. Overwhelming as if you were experiencing Stendhal syndrome: you don't think about yourself when facing wonders. But, again, it's not about having wonders in front of me, either, because yes, I like the sea and the pine and the chirping, but the brothel and the cars used to make me kind of sad. So maybe it’s not about how nice the things that surround me are, but about the action of leaving behind all those fleeting thoughts and feelings of cold or sadness. As if I were returning to the solid, warm place I inhabited before this one, where there is nothing for me to do or feel other than the joy of being. Being in the most painless, immaterial, humble and absolute way of all.

So, yes, it was a nice first swim. Today, the sea isn’t swimmable, but I hope you understand there's not much I can do about the sea, the tree or the Sloop. I guess that's what got me into closing my eyes and trying not to think in the first place. Well, the cozy space is available anytime... and there's nothing for me to do there anyway, so apart from my breathing guilt, I reckon everything is fine.

An almost-serious piece on overcoming the urge to become a hermit

Two and a half thousand years ago, a man frowned up at the stars. So absorbed was he that the well under his feet went unnoticed. Needless to say, he fell in. A peasant began to laugh. The man turned to her and shrugged. ‘I worry more about what’s going on up there than down here,’ he smiled.

This man was Thales of Miletus, and he was looking for the truth. He must have thought the times were a bit truth-less. Pre-truth, to be exact. Two and a half thousand years later, some say we live in post-truth times. That the body of real things, events and facts is shapeshifting, like a body of water that tricks us with our own reflection. That truth is something we can live without, a luxury, a risky habit of looking too far in the distance that will, ultimately, trip us. Thales could have lived without truth, yet still he searched for it. Maybe he suspected that truth could do something for us that was worth the fallings.

Not to compare myself with Thales, but I’ve also had a few tumbles since my own search for truth began. In my case, more than what’s up there in the stars, I guess I’ve always tried to be open to what’s down here, to make sense of it. I search for truth to reconcile myself with a world that doesn’t always treat me good. I want to understand it so I can love it regardless. Well, lately, this hasn’t been easy, and I’ve felt tempted to isolate myself even more than I’m being asked to by closing my door to reality. I won’t lie: though at the beginning it seemed like a way to avoid more sorrow, soon it felt like the sorriest way of all. And so I did what I do best when the way is sorrowful: I went to my library and retraced the footsteps of a few wise souls in search of truth. Of people who, unlike me at that point, dared to face what was happening around them. 

I began reading about those who looked at the natural world, like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. Heraclitus was a melancholic guy. He looked for constancy and found nothing but change. Change as the result of tensions, change as a manifestation of a certain harmony. As I learnt more about Heraclitus, I started wondering why change is so scary. Perhaps it’s because it often involves loss. Maybe that’s what gave Heraclitus the blues. Turning our back to it doesn’t protect us from loss, though. If anything, it adds to it. 

Next, I turned to Charles Darwin, like some kind of tortoise suffering an existential crisis. Many centuries after Heraclitus faced the world, he did too and I guess he was the first one who noticed that change came with demands. Apparently this thing about being open to the world doesn’t end with facing it, doesn’t end with noticing its ever-changing nature. It urges a response. Change seemed to be the world’s will. Now, adapting to it, as Darwin saw things, was up to us.

Up to us… I continued reading about those who looked inwards. The Ancient Greeks knew that to find the truth, it wasn’t enough to stare at the stars. The aphorism ‘know thyself’ was a cornerstone of wisdom engraved in the portico of Apollo’s temple. This was to warn visitors that if they wanted to know something about the world, they should look inside first. Self knowledge was necessary to the search for truth. It makes perfect sense to me, since our talents and shortcomings determine how we see the world and a refusal to face them is a closing to reality. So if Socrates treated self-knowledge as fundamental to being able to know, I thought I should give it a go if I ever wanted to leave my room again. 

Just like the old truth-seekers, I spent a good while looking out and looking in. And just like the Temple of Apollo collapsed, so too did my pile of science and self-knowledge books. And just like the philosophers were still missing something, so was I. About to despair, I came across a few lines by the Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Hora. To know himself, he realised, first he needed to be known by another person. This made sense to me: it’d be tricky to become aware of our flaws and potential without facing anybody that triggered them. 

I jumped out of the bed and made my Poirot face: it appeared that in this search for truth, in this staying open to reality, we enter into a peculiar chain of contingency. To access reality, we must face the world. But we can’t do that without facing ourselves, which in turn is impossible without facing others. I left my room and there I was, standing before another human being, ready for the great knowing to really get started. I quickly realised, though, that other people aren’t there for us to know ourselves and know the world, but for something entirely different...

Back in my library I found that thousands of years after Heraclitus, a holocaust survivor began to doubt the inherited ancient Greek understanding of philosophy as a dispensable love for wisdom, and started talking about the fundamental need for a wisdom of love. Emmanuel Levinas thought we are insofar as we are for others. His search for truth revealed to him that as our search for truth begins, so begins our responsibility towards the other. Like his friend, the contemporary philosopher and liberation theologist Enrique Dussel, says, ‘When the other suffers, from his pain he utters a howl, a cry, a plea that’s the original summons.’ 

The beauty of staying open is that it requires us to face the other, consider their needs and make them the subject of a new reality. A more just reality for all of us. When we open to the other in this way, understanding happens, compassion happens, and a radical transformation of the self and the world happens. When our will to find the truth leads us in front of another human being, we see that they aren’t there so we can know. They are there so we can love. 

Now, as I open my windows wide and start giving signs of life, Thales of Miletus and his stumble come to mind and I wonder if he suspected that truth was never dispensable. What if our survival – the down-here – actually depends on it? If a millennial search for truth leads us to love, it must be worth continuing that search. We might have fallen in a well, or something even darker, but hope lives on if we make the effort to stay open to the world in all its change and harmony; to ourselves, to our flaws and our capacities; and to others, for whom we are. And as a shared notion of reality seems in danger of disappearing, I step out of my room and remind myself that reality is not a trick: it is all we have, a collection of offers and absences, a demand to stay open and respond. The place where love is.

Wildflowers

I have this bad habit of searching for meaning. I go to the dictionary looking for trouble in simple words, words I use daily, only to see if they are defined in ways that make me feel differently. Not sure why I need to do that. I wasn't going to write anything today, in fact, because today is a good day and for once I don't have to improve it. Heaven knows how long it has been since a day like this one. I sat outside. A clear sky. A breeze gently moving the flowers that have grown next to the cactus. Everything is. But then again, as if looking for trouble, I had to start wondering if I was neglecting the cactus that my parents had lovingly maintained for decades. I'd never seen wildflowers growing around it before. Am I supposed to pluck them?

The dictionary says a garden is a plot of ground where herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables are cultivated. Cultivated. Human intervention is clearly implied. Since I returned home, and against my mother's will, I've been watering the garden. I've watered the garden but I've let it be the rest of the time. When flowers open and birds visit, I stare at it. That's all I do: water and marvel. Then this young guy comes from time to time to trim the hedge. His chainsaw beheads dionysian flowers and wakes everyone up. My mum sends him. I know she doesn't share my preferences for romantic aesthetics, but after decapitations, the garden blooms right on time and I see her motives are not so bad. The thing is... what do we gain, mum?

In old pictures the garden looks glorious. My father was peerless in keeping it at bay. I can see him trimming bushes with big iron scissors in the classic Nasrid style. I can hear the snips and the spaces between them anytime I want. I can play French skipping while he prunes, bury handwritten predictions and swing under a lemon tree we had many years ago. Sometimes, I can even trick myself into entering the croquet ground of those black and white pictures from before I was born. My dad and I: a bicephalous playing card painting the roses red, keeping my unknown grandparents happy. Toddlers in flared pants, mum, playful and there, as I never saw her, all of us blinded by sunlight. Just like Alice dreams of wonders under a common tree, I dream of harmony in a perfectly symmetrical garden. But harmony has as much to do with symmetry as wonders have with common trees. As Versailles-esque as the garden looked, as neatly outlined as it still is, the truth is that it's been a constant fight to make something harmonious out of it and nobody's ever been able to lie on its ground, because the grass was torn out and you can't lie on mud surrounded by spiky spherical bushes.

So, what do we do now mum? Am I expected to cut the precious wildflowers? Am I to carry on working on this plot of ground the way you guys did because that's the way it's always been and I have a soft spot for the glorious past, a wild imagination, and the feeling I'm meant to shape what exists into something that perhaps never was and maybe it should not even be? Or am I to pluck the flowers because the garden is - above all - yours?

I have to tell you, mum, you have a strange way to care for a garden: no water, little lying down, lots of chops. And I have a strange way to search for meaning: too much marvelling, no trimming, a taste for trouble and an incredible tolerance for beheadings. And you know what? So be it. So be the wildflower around the cactus, and the chainsaw when it comes, and let's let my watering happen and your idea of a garden prevail. I'm going to stare at it all. I'm going to let the old pictures be pictures from a time I didn't live, couldn't judge and won't restore. Let's let the garden be as it is now: a cypress fort that makes us invisible, a ground stubbornly fertile in spite of us. And I'm going to marvel just the same because today is a good day and I don't have to improve it, yet I do. 

The empath strikes back

             

I have a friend. She's a control freak. You don't get the vibe right away cause she looks a bit untidy, you know what I mean? But yeah, you can see that pattern in her. Once I went to her place and everything was just kept away, like I took off my coat, left it on the sofa and before I realised, it was gone. She'd taken it away, put it in a closet or something. That's more messed up than what people think, cause it's like you have to have things to happen in a certain way? I don't really know, but I'm telling you. Yeah, like imagine trying that these days. I don't even know how she keeps it together. I mean, she doesn't. Sorry, what? Yeah, I've called her. I check on her from time to time. She's a good friend. I don't know. I would say 'reliable'. Cause this is the thing, there's some predictability in her, right? I think so... I haven't really asked her about her job in a while. She's into admin or something. I think she works for herself. She used to be up and down with a folder all day. I have no idea what's going on with that now. No, I have to ask her. She was away for a few years and then she came back. Oh, really? Well, she's been with someone for a while. I think she still is. Well, I guess they cope somehow. Honestly, I haven't asked her about that either. Yeah, we talk. What do you mean? We talked more about my stuff last time, cause, you know, I've been going through a lot. Well, she's really good at talking, like you listen to her and she's got this clarity. She gives good advice. But then you look at her life and you go like, babe... I know, I know. Control freaks give advice, I see. No, she doesn't know she's one. Me? Why would I tell her? I mean, I don't blame her: I've met her sisters. Buff, you don't want to know. A lot of crap. Like day and night, yeah. That's what has us all screwed up, isn't it? Not an excuse but kind of sad if you think about it, cause let me tell you, she's smart. I don't know, she's funny. She's an artist. No, she doesn't do anything exactly. Nah, she's not into that at all. No, no, no. She's really down to earth. What? I have no idea, as I was saying. Don't know what she's doing. She said she'd stay but she always leaves. Exactly, I can't blame her. I've tried to meet her twice since she came. I told her, I'm coming over, but she was like, no, this, that... Probably. No, she's really social otherwise. What else am I supposed to do? The world is upside down. At some point you either give in or... That's right. People are losing it in general. Like, you know, she doesn't cook? She hates cooking. You see her kitchen and... The cleanest kitchen I've seen in my life, I swear to god, like an operating theatre. She doesn't fry an egg so it doesn't spit oil around. She actually has this thing with oily stuff, she can't touch it. Yeah, she can do that, it's just when it's in between her fingers. No, she doesn't, she doesn't moisturise her face either, no foundation, suncream, nothing. Sorry? No, she actually looks younger than me, can you believe it!? I often wonder 'are all these creams making me look worse or what?' Hahaha. No, she does some makeup, sort of. Without foundation, I know, it's weird. You're right, it's genetics. For the good and bad, oh dear, hahaha. Anyway, so she doesn't cook ever and now she's cooking? I was like... wot? I know, right? Upside down. I guess you gotta let it be at some point. So, yeah, about your boss, just don't take it personal cause, you know. I mean these people struggle a lot. What? You know what? Loads of people say that! That I'm an empath? Oh my! I don't know, I'm just normal, hahaha. That's right. Sure. Oh, yeah. Let's do that next time. Ok? You ok, though? Ok, take care. Bye darling. Bye. 

Dream

You close your eyes and see two families of hedgehogs in an open field. The weather is not brilliant. The members of one family get together to maintain the warmth of their bodies. The other family has a different strategy: they also gather, but they keep a certain distance. You look closer and see how they are still shivering a bit. It's going to be a chilly night. You stare at the tight family. They're a cozy pack. You wish you were one of them. You fall asleep thinking unity makes strength.

You are back in the open field. It's daytime. Some of the hedgehogs of the distant family don't move anymore. They froze overnight. You run to the tight family. Some of them don't move anymore. They bled to death due to quill wounds.

You want to escape the dream. You already know it's a dream, but for whatever reason you have to bury the bodies.

While you drive the shovel home, the hedgehogs who survived from the tight family are climbing on each other's backs. A hedgehog tower. As if nothing.

The tower looks harmonious and geometrically perfect. I can't describe the shape, because I don't know the name of many geometrical figures. The members of the distant family are methodically preparing butter sandwiches. You can't tell if they're devastated or unbothered. You can't tell how anybody feels.

You bury the wounded and frozen bodies. It takes you an eternity. You know you're in a dream but you can't escape it, so you keep digging.

There are no hedgehogs anymore in the open field. There's just you and a tiny, blonde lady with a pixie haircut. She's some metres away from you, looking up at the sky. You look up too. She extends her arms as if awaiting something. You extend your arms a little too.

Two objects crossing the atmosphere at the speed of meteors rush towards you and the pixie lady. When yours is close enough, you realise it's a baby. You jump to catch him in such a way that his head doesn't get hurt from the impact against your body.

You catch him. The baby is alive, his head is undamaged. You can't stop staring at him. You've never seen anything as tender, inherently good, fragile and lively. You know it's a miracle. You've almost forgotten you're dreaming. But you haven't.

Then your arms start to ache. Terribly. You notice the baby is very, very heavy but for whatever reason you can't change the way in which you're holding him. You are in agony but he must not fall. He's the most extraordinary thing you've ever held.

You look at the pixie-haircut lady. She's holding an identical baby in a completely different manner. She looks fine, so you try to copy the position of her arms.

It's pointless. For whatever reason you can't.

You drag yourself towards her to ask for help. When you're close enough, you see half of her tiny body is already buried in the ground due to the weight of her baby. She smiles while the ground swallows her.

You want to escape. You remind yourself it's all a dream, but you can't leave the baby. He must not fall. You open your eyes.

You see your room. You carry on with your life. You make yourself a butter sandwich. You can't tell how you're feeling. You see perfect geometrical figures everywhere. You still try to learn their names. You cure your wounds. You keep a certain distance. You bury bodies. As if nothing. You decide you'll hold life once again. It's very, very heavy but for whatever reason it must not fall.

It's the most extraordinary thing you've ever held.

The survey (an essay about tendencies in unprecedented times)

When I think of hobbies, surveys come to mind. Escaping the severity of current times would probably be easier for me if I played guitar, chess or bought a pair of rollerblades. But we all know the ways of entertainment are inscrutable, so a few weeks ago I launched one of my famous surveys. People around me know them well: I usually propose a hypothetical and ethically problematic situation and leave my respondents to solve it, treasuring the most amusing answers and occasionally sharing them over tea. This time, well, I guess I took things one step further.

Let's not get into hardcore philosophy and depart from a simple assumption, if you don't mind daring for the sake of having a good time. Let's say we all have our own  set of beliefs (or logbook of experiences) with which we navigate reality (or events around us). Something like an individual world-map that allows us to move around without getting too lost. Agree? Well done, that has saved us a few centuries of quarrels. Onto the survey now: I wanted to know how we add to our personal world-map, how we accommodate in it new, perhaps puzzling, or, as they like to say nowadays, 'unprecedented' events that occur – and if we do it at all.

I decided to limit the ways in which we integrate – or not – new stuff into our maps to three. It could have been two, or 13, but since it was my survey, I went for three. Apologies for the audacity: remember that surveys are my turn in karaoke. Ok, the skeleton of my survey looked like this:

Before an a priori inexplicable event that lingers in time you think you would...

1. Try to find an explanation. Most events are the effect of a cause. Causes should be within my reach – c'mon, I'm the knower of the universe – and isn't finding them kind of my duty as a decent, rational being anyhow? Plus, if I don't understand something, I frown way too much. Bad for wrinkles. 

2. Accept it. That's how sh*t happens now, so be it. I surrender to reality since not all events have a cause and, even if they do, we humans can't always comprehend them. Finding causes can't be what we're here for, dude. 'Roll with it' is my motto. Don't fight it; embrace it. Peace.

3. Ignore it. I believe most events have a cause and most causes can be understood by me, of course, but who says I need to waste my time finding the causes of everything? Plus, life is too short for things that don't make sense. YOLO, and close the door when you leave. I've got sensible things to deal with. Thanks. 

Obviously, I wasn't going to present the survey like this to my respondents. If I had done it, for a start no one would have wanted to take part, since there was a negative side to every answer. There was a risk they would have considered the image they were giving of themselves by picking one option or another, and you want people to be as spontaneous and sincere as possible. Also, what if it was too complicated to understand? I needed to come up with a more chewable scenario, something nerve-racking and mundane that would trigger an almost instinctive response. This is how I finally presented my survey:

 

Suppose you don't have a driving license or a car and one fine day you go out to the street and you see that all the cars are going in reverse: on the street, on the highway, everywhere.  You try to find out what's going on but no one gives you a satisfactory answer. A year goes by and things don't change.

What would you do?

 

1 Think that there has to be a reason and keep investigating until you find it

 

2 Accept that's the way things are and move on with your life

 

3 Try to forget about it because things that do not make sense bother you after a while

 

In a way, these options respond to three tendencies in regards to how we interact with unprecedented phenomena – or what you might want to simply call 'reality'. The first one being, 'I'd better understand what's going on to not get too lost in this world'; the second: 'I'd better accept what's going on to not get too lost in this world'; and finally,  'Too bad if I get lost in this world, I'm not going to waste my life trying to understand absurdities'. In other words, we can say there are two ways to approach the unexplained: either we integrate it into our experience (by explaining or simply accepting it), or we don't. That's it.

I must admit that the consequence of deliberately leaving stuff outside my world-map because it has already consumed too much time is unknown to me. Yes, as you might have guessed by now, I face-fall into the first tendency. I am a No 1. Hence my dedicating my free time to epistemology. Jokes aside, I wonder if No 3s are not No 1s fighting their nature in the hopes of maintaining some energy reservoir. I mean, let's face it: who's wearing themselves out more than anybody else here? The No 1 folk. Unlike No 3s, they conquer the unknown and experience great excitement when they finally scream 'eureka!', but the road to getting there is often steep, arduous and full of dangers that I'll describe later. 

But let's talk about No 2 a bit. Two of the most important people in my life belong to that profile, and – I'm not going to lie – they exasperate the life out of me, and leave me thrashing about, hopping like a tick next to their composure. I envy them so much... I wish I could be just like them, to go with the flow and then to sleep. But I suspect we don't really get to choose our tendencies, I suspect we just acquire them during our early years when the dice of nature and nurture are rolled, so... I can't just fake it until I make a No 2 and surrender to reality without a good ol' explanation. I'm just a poor No 1, trapped in my anthropocentric beliefs, thinking the answers are out there, just at the tip of my fingers, doomed to a constant search.

At this point you must all suspect No 1 is the prototypical Western Kid, and you might be right. Darwin, Newton, Copernicus didn't just let it be. Scientists, philosophers, doctors, poets have always had questions. Why the weight? Why the being? Why the illness? Why the heartbreak? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind... and I'm gonna catch it! But let's also give No 2s their credits, shall we? Yoga wouldn't exist without them, eastern philosophy, epiphanies, nirvanas, Yogananda, Krishnamurti, Rumi, the Bhagavad Gita, synchronised walking, I mean... they conquered peace within. We owe them a wider sense of love and comfort and the acknowledgment of an incomparable harmony. How about No 3s? Oh, well. I want to believe it's thanks to threes that in the midst of all this ecstasy we open the tap and there's still running water. They're there finishing books and keeping focus on a lot of things without attempting to integrate into their maps everything they come across. The world runs on threes and we must honour their sacrifice of leaving a chunk of reality outside their radar. It mustn't be easy – from a No 1 perspective, of course. Shout out to threes. Respect. 

What were the results of my survey? Well, I had a sample of 50 individuals. A mix of men and women, students, relatives and friends aged 20 to 70, with various academic backgrounds, mostly from Europe, North America and the Middle East. Here's what happened:

60% answered No 1

40% didn't (24% went for No 2 and 16% for No 3)

'What!?' That was the most common reaction among No 1s when I broke the news to them. Most of them, unlike twos, had been quick and sharp when giving their answer, and had accompanied it with something along the lines of, 'Of course, No 1', or 'Option 1, is there any other sensible choice?'. It didn't come as a surprise that many were shocked by what they considered a worrying lack of curiosity in their peers. However, the majority of No 2s gave unrequested justifications to their answers and, when given the results, didn't seem particularly surprised. Why were No 1s so sure of themselves and No 2s so apologetic? Probably, I concluded, due to cultural pressure. Perhaps if I had conducted my survey in a non-Western latitude, the majority would have shifted to No 2. Yes, believe it or not, No 1 seems to be the politically correct response to my hypothetical scenario in current Western society. The Enlightenment did its thing and it lasted. Maybe ones are so sure of their ways because their tendency is backed up by an educational system that praises the scientific method, rationalism, and an incorruptible faith in the cause-effect nature of all there is. This belief in explanatory causes and a quasi-divine call to find them fits neatly into the anthropocentric – and, let's be honest, arrogant – worldview of the Western being and their desire to leave no stone unturned. The Abrahamic cultures of my respondents sit well in No 1 chairs too. After all, God is cause. A majority of ones, once again, might have not been the case if the religious backgrounds of my respondents were mostly rooted in Eastern beliefs – prone perhaps to a No 2 take on God and its manifestations. 

So far, the survey's results seemed to confirm what I could have guessed if I had for once had the patience to sit and reflect silently, but... one sec, how come!? I reviewed those who answered No 1. The denialists were all there!! **WARNING** **RED ALERT** **ELON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM** Ok, let me explain. Many of you might have a lot of reasonable arguments by now to question the sample of my survey – or even my survey as a whole – given the fact that my respondents were basically my acquaintances, people I had consciously or unconsciously selected and with whom I had discussed many other topics. This can bias the already biased attempt of any anthropological research even more. But not all was wrong with it. I knew these people, and I knew that a group of them are what they nowadays like to call 'denialists'. A denialist is 'a person who denies the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid' according to Merriam-Webster. Yes, I have friends like that, relatives like that and even students like that. They might think the globe is not getting warmer, that the financial crisis is exclusively due to immigration or that hospitals have actually been empty all this time. How come they, just like many cautious and empirical respondents, all went for No 1? Finally, I sat and reflected silently. These are the conclusions I drew:

An event pops. A No 1 instinctively proceeds to search for its causes to integrate it in his or her experience. The event in question might have one simple cause that's easy to trace back. No 1 might find it.

Example: there are cucumbers on the beach. Local cucumber farmers have been throwing tons of their product on the nearby motorway for a while to protest against price drops. Our No 1 doesn't just accept the presence of cucumbers on the sand and carry on with their walk. Nor do they ignore said cucumbers. Our No 1 faces the cucumbers in all their out-of-placeness and ends up connecting their presence with the protests, understanding finally why the cucumbers are there. 

Good for No 1: they're going to enrich their world-map and have a better sense of the state of things in the local area. But, what if, instead of cucumbers in the beach, our No 1 bumps into an international financial crisis? What if there is not just one simple cause, but an entangled skein of complex causes behind it? And what if our No 1 doesn't have the knowledge, the tools or the time to disentangle it? What's he gonna do? Do you think he's going to embark on life-consuming research that would imply years of theoretical studies and empirical observation? Some of our celebrated No 1s undoubtedly do and did, but I'm afraid our average No 1 won't, or won't always do it. Still, the need for an explanation will bug our guy and have him frowning. He just won't let it go and stay lost in the forest. He needs explanations to be able to sleep tonight, so he's going to make a cut in the tangled mess and extract an accessible, yet fragmented and incomplete piece of cause. He's going to reduce the explanation to something in his reach that would allow him some peace of mind and his daily dose of forehead straightening. Hence, the ones who attribute the financial crisis exclusively to immigration, environmental activism to George Soros's plotting and the current situation to 5G chose No 1 too.

There you go: the average No 1 seems to be at a higher risk than the other two profiles of being wrong, very wrong, very very wrong in the drawing of his conclusions and world map. His set of beliefs, his logbook of experiences are constantly relying on explanatory principles that might misrepresent and reduce what's actually happening. No 1 can be Newton or Pasteur, but No 1 can also be Bolsonaro or his convinced supporters and the first kind makes a small fraction of us, while the second kind... makes an army. Damnit!

We're in deep trouble here, since according to my results, 60% of my acquaintances have No 1 tendencies. My culture is a No 1. I myself am a No 1! Argh!! I'm in serious danger to be dead wrong about pretty much everything I thought I had explained – including my lovely survey! Oh, heavens... why do I, as a No 1, even exist? How have humans survived this long with so many stubborn, arrogant and likely-to-get-it-wrong individuals among them? No 2, please, come and help me. Inhale, exhale... All right, that's better. Maybe... we've survived because we're not the only type that there is? Maybe thanks to the important prevalence of the countercultural No 2s and 3s among us? Maybe because they balance out our obsession with explaining things (often partially or totally incorrectly)? Maybe because just as biodiversity makes our existence possible as a species, neurodiversity makes it so as a society? Ok, ok, I'm not going to get too excited again, now that I know that I might be oversimplifying the causes, but, isn't all this a bit of cheer? 

If we were all No 1s the world might look a lot more like Bolsonaro's utopia than Pandora in Avatar, that's to say if we existed and hadn't killed each other already many years ago. But if we were all No 2s, I doubt very much we would have a global life expectancy of 72 years, assuming, again, we had managed to keep ourselves alive on this planet. And if we were all No 3s... well, we wouldn't have antibiotics or labour pranayama... who would have made it in a world like that!? Not you, not me. Ask your mum.

So, here it is. The final – perhaps right or possibly wrong – conclusion of my survey is that, given an unprecedented event and given how dangerously wrong many cause-seekers might be, we'd better be thankful for the prevalence of those who simply accept it and those too busy to think about it. There is not really a desirable predominant profile that, as a society, could save us from destruction, but rather a balance that would. Nature, unlike us, balances, is wiser than even the best No 1s and a lot more trustworthy. Perhaps, at an individual level, we could copy Nature a bit and – without fighting our tendencies too much – keep our inner cause-seeker, our acceptance soul and our practical streak as awake and in balance as possible. We need them all to avoid succumbing to this pickle. Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to the beach to meditate and get some cucumbers for my salad.

A sci-fi intro

Once upon a time, in the most beautiful planet of the universe, there was a civilization formed by beings that used to be born, love and die. For hundreds of years its people worked to learn how to keep themselves alive for longer and make the day of their death as far as possible from the day of their birth. They worked really hard and managed to duplicate their time in the most beautiful planet of the universe. They duplicated their chances to love and be loved.

One day, all those efforts, those hundreds of years of work learning how to stay alive and love for longer, were shattered. The places and tools they had built to keep themselves alive for longer collapsed and millions were dying. The reason for this was as tiny as was the way to avoid it. They had worked for thousands of years to create complex systems that enabled them to access resources, solve problems and organize themselves to prevent collapses. But they didn't use that knowledge, they didn't use those resources, they didn't use those systems.

The leaders of this civilization suddenly worked really hard to make these beings believe that the loss of lives and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge was unavoidable. They wanted to preserve their privileges by doing so. Among the rest of the beings, some still knew how avoidable all this was. Most of them had to accept that the avoidable wasn't really avoidable because it was unavoidable that the leaders and the rest of the beings acted the way they did.

But in a corner of the planet, a small fraction of these beings, a really small fraction, refused to believe it had to be that way. One of them is still alive and telling this story today. 

Tornado

It was a dusty place for the most part but it had tacky neon lights and cool reptiles of all sorts. I liked it. I was there on a mission to survive, so that land was as good as any other. One day, after work, I went to the local bar to have a chat with friends. There were talks of a tornado coming but it wasn't unusual in the region. Conversations span around other topics like low income and heartbreak. Then a foreign guy entered the bar. His attire was strange and called everyone's attention. Everyone's but mine, cause he also had this enchanting voice and an accent I couldn't fully figure out. That voice was all I could think of for days to come.

The foreign guy and I became inseparable and moved together to a tiny shack. From then on, time became something difficult to measure. They say time is ultimately the number of rotations electrons make around the nucleus of a certain atom, or something like that. I can't tell how many times the foreign guy and I went around each other, so I guess I can't really say how much time passed. It could have been years. 

One afternoon, back in the bar, some friends left the conversation and stood up to stare at the TV. I thought it was a football match but apparently it was the weather forecast. I never could bare the spaces left blank on the map with no suns or clouds, so I went to get some cashew nuts. As the barman was pouring them into a small bowl, the roof of the bar blew off. For a while the cashew nuts were in suspension right on top of where they were supposed to fall, but it didn't last long cause glasses began to crash into each other and I lost track of them. Everyone ran to their cars and the foreign guy made gestures for me to jump into his convertible 4 x 4. 

In hindsight I clearly understand how inconvenient a convertible is in a situation like that, but what can I say... I'd just seen the barman flutter horizontally. Anyway, we hit the road just like everyone else, but unlike us, they were stopping at the neon-signalled tornado shelters. I saw them pulling the ground doors open one by one and closing them on top of their heads, all very cinematic. That could have been a good moment to ask the foreign guy to pull over, but I assumed we were heading to the shack.

Some miles later I didn't recognize the landscape any longer. We might have left the shack behind. 'There ain't no shack no more,' he said with his beautiful voice and his intriguing accent.

'Then... Where are we going?'

The wind was full of seashells at that point, so I could barely open my eyes. It was all bumps, thunder noise and gritted teeth peppered with sand. He didn't answer. That's when I wondered how he was still able to see the road and keep driving. I opened an eye to look at him. For the first time I noticed his attire. He had aviator goggles, stuck tight to his face. He wore gloves, waterproofs and military boots. Different barometers and compasses were attached to his belt and he was holding a radio transmitter in his right hand. His smile was full of adrenaline and yet somehow peaceful. It left no shadow of a doubt: he was a tornado chaser. 

'Here EF Fiver approaching the eye, you copy me?' I could have jumped, or perhaps just unlocked my seatbelt and let the wind blow me away from the convertible. But instead I did nothing. I was beginning to understand a few inexplicable things that until then I had subconsciously dismissed, like what was he doing in this land? Or why did he keep the shack keys on a harness clip, for god's sake? What was that harness-clip thing all about!!? I thought of calling my friends to seek comfort and advice, but they were all in the shelters and perhaps there would be no signal underground. Besides, where was my phone?

The seashells were scratching my hands. Isolated and shocked I managed to scream, 'Stop the car, now!' The foreign guy immediately pressed the brakes. 'We need to talk,' I said. My hair was whipping in all directions.

'Don't you wanna see the tornado?' he asked with a perplexed expression.

I had to make a big effort to hear my own voice. 'What's there?'

'A tornado!' he said.

'I know, but what's in the tornado?'

'You never know. C'mon! let's find out!' He started the engine again; a tree flew by.

'No, wait!'

'What's the matter, sweet cheeks?' He seemed so surprised I wasn't keen on driving into the center of a tornado that I didn't know what to say anymore.

'Have you seen my phone?' I finally asked.

'Can't hear you.'

'My phone, I need to talk to my friends.' There were fish floating in the air.

'They won't be reachable,' he said.

'How do you know?' I asked suspiciously.

'I saw them going down the shelters.'

'What's in those shelters?'

'I don't know. New houses, babies, promotions? Just boring stuff. They won't pick up. C'mon, sweet cheeks. We're getting close!' His beautiful smile was the last thing I saw before a green sunfish slapped my face at 200 miles per hour.

I guess I blacked out.

I'm not sure how long I was unconscious for but the wind and the thunder were back at full volume when I woke up. The foreign guy said the spiky fins almost poked my eye out. I touched my face to make sure I still had two eyes. I had. Honestly, I think I was still feeling a bit bewildered from the slap. It's just one of those things you are not expecting, you know?

'Trust me, you'll be fine,' he said with that mesmerising voice. 'Just take this harness and hook it to the strings of the side bars of the car. Here's a clip. Don't mind the shack keys. We no longer need them, ha!' He was so excited... I didn't know how to feel anymore and that rarely happens to me, so I started suspecting everything could be just a dream. I smiled and hooked myself to the car.

A few more miles into the storm the sky had turned into a jurassic, grey sea monster. It was raining so much and with the fish floating and all I just pretended we were actually underwater, to feel less soaked. And then – while the foreign guy was singing the quiet part of Good Vibrations with his heaven-made voice, 'Gotta keep those lovin' good vibrations a happenin' with her' – I saw it! I saw it! I saw the smoky tongue, the hell-like tongue of the jurassic, grey sea monster, licking the life out of the earth, like a dragon.

'I can't,' I suddenly yelled. Unfortunately, my yelling coincided with the 'ahhh' crescendo that comes right after that part of the song, and the foreign guy didn't hear me.

'Hey, stop!' I said.

'What's up?'

'Listen, I'm sorry, I just can't do this, it's too scary for me.'

He looked so damned surprised. 'What are you scared of?'

'I don't know what's there, in the tornado. What if I don't like it? What if I like the shelters better, the houses, you know, the boring stuff.'

He looked as if he couldn't trust his ears. I mean, despite the rain and the spinning rooftops and the shells and all the things that were blocking the view, he was visibly shocked. I had to ask him, 'Have I disappointed you?'

'No, well, I mean... I thought you were curious about tornados, that's all.' The sky was fire-black.

'Listen, I see why you might have gotten that impression and I'm sorry about that. I'm genuinely curious about tornados, but I'm not a chaser.' The car began to move backwards.

'I'm not a what?' He couldn't hear me.

'A tornado chaser.' Backwards faster and faster.

'Louder, please.' The tires had left the road.

'I think I might die in this tornado shit!' We were suspended and still, like the cashew nuts above the bowl. 'I think this storm may be too much for me and I don't want to die.' Suddenly, all became silent. 'Cause I think I have more love to give, so I don't wanna die and waste it all chasing a tornado, as much as I'd love to know what's inside.'

The foreign guy seemed to smile and Zzzzzzztwissssssssssstttttttttttttttt!...