Birth days and death days from mere numbers become symbols - this victim that shared my birthday, has now the second inevitable date engraved in stone, and recorded in an Excel file, and in the vital records of the administration still to be updated. Two of the victims were born on the same day, month and year, twins that met each other just on the appointed dates, were next to each other in hospital cribs, and last month under a long tent in the same row, waiting for the closing embrace of a wooden case.
Some decades ago in the old hospital their mothers were maybe chatting and joking to ease the long labour hours, and screaming together in childbirth until tears of joy would come to cancel the pain. God will their mothers may be already gone before them so as not to cry other tears these days. Between the two dates enclosing each precious, unique existence, were thousands of days of frail humanity, each moment filling the span, unaware, as if there will always be another tomorrow. The closing date was engraved this year in the hundreds of times repeated characters - 6 April 2009 - the date that hundreds of years in front of us will appear in history books, in a time when both victims and survivors will be long forgotten - dust thou art...
"We are put on earth a little space... " the eternal words of the poet keep vibrating in my mind, making me ask the usual question, why are we here and now, where life and death are walking side by side and one instantly turns into the other with no fault on our part, no disease, no accident. What veil covers the truth, is there a sense in courage, in rebuilding what in the blink of an eye in earth's time will turn into dust again and as if it never existed...
The sand castle is being washed away by the tide, the kids that built it this morning no more in sight, the beach deserted, another planet. The Waste Land is our landscape, where giving up is so easy, within reach, just round the corner, estrangement so fascinating, abandon the mind to the tidal waves, until we too are washed away with the sand of the castle.
Rise, start to fly again, everybody keeps saying, but what for? Death will come all the same as it did for Hamlet's father, unaware in the fullness of his sins, will come in the middle of rebuilding, or at the end, what matters anyhow? Rise again for the children? But I do not have some spare strength to give to others today, not even to my children, I cannot even think of raising a finger. Maybe tomorrow, tomorrow I'll try my wings again, but not today, today I just want to lie down, forget my past and my present, lose any identity left in the healing, hypnotic sound of sea waters.
Post-traumatic stress they say, try these pills, speak to the doctors. What for? The disease is just in some basic, elementary questions, why to live, what to live for, what doctor or drug can answer these questions? I had answers before, answers conquered little by little that gave meaning to my days leading towards a planned future. But there is no more future now. All plans gone, every small and great project wiped away leaving an empty blackboard, a black hole that has annihilated the thousands and thousands personal pathways that all of us had been opening for decades. The future is a blank, black page today. Tomorrow, next week, next month ... we do not know where we will be, where we will sleep or cook, what we will do. And the strength to write each new day on a new blank paper - when even finding a pen is a conquest - , with no yesterdays and no tomorrows, the strength is somewhere else today. It was here yesterday, it may come back the day after tomorrow, but it is not here today.