I wrote this story yesterday. I translated to English with the help of Google Translate and added my own revisions and fixes.
Beam of light in the sky
Last night I saw a beam of purple light in the sky. It was a giant, vibrant thing, like something done with a brush. There was no one with me at the time, but if it had been, they might not have even seen them. It was like that space between two blinks of the eye. Like film photography. Nothing in this world flies like that, and it wasn't like it flew either, it was more like a stone thrown from afar, falling in the distance in a perfect parabola. It fell without a sound, and the earth trembled beneath my feet. When dawn came I went to the beach where I saw the beam of light fall. The tide was coming in but had not yet erased the large circle of burnt sand. I turned on the television waiting for the news, and also looked on the internet. Anything.
The days passed, and, as the memory mixed with other things that were happening, it became more and more distant.
Perhaps there are many inexplicable facts out there about which sensible people think it best to remain silent. My grandfather painted crosses on the doors of his house to ward off werewolves. In the past, some people had statues in their living rooms to ward off hauntings.
We pretend we live in this world here, but the beyond is always out there pressing on the walls of reason. The word is a lamp — it clarifies what is in reach while it reveals and accentuates the darkness that cannot be reached.
Only rarely does what we see on the vigil have the truth of a dream or nightmare. The remaining events are like shallow pencil lines, or they do not penetrate the brain.
I still remember the beam of light in the sky. Even if it haunted me, I could never forget it. It was a little secret that made me special. Taking the subway, buying bread, or walking around the neighborhood, I was more than a man. I was a man with a mystery.
***
There was a tall, thin guy in the middle of the carriage. He had a backpack over his shoulder, arms splayed at the waist. Only us both on the train. During the thirty-minute journey, He maintained balance without using his hands. When I looked at his feet, I noticed that they were floating half an inch off the ground. I felt watched and looked up. He smiled at me. His eyes were milky white, without divisions. A white ball looking towards me.
***
Team meeting at work. Someone commented about the party the previous weekend. Of course, I wasn't invited, and if I was invited, I wouldn't go. There's something very artificial about the way normal people move. Hundreds of muscles to say "Good morning", pull up a chair, display agreeableness, and perform belonging. All the time performing what they already are, lying so that others believe what they already know to be true. It's not enough to be good, you also need to dramatize your own goodness. And they are, in fact, good.
Because they're good, they invite me to the party next week (I'm not going), because they're good, they ask my opinion on all important topics (I don't care), and, because they're good, they'll never say there's no place in that group for a nasty, ugly, stupid guy like me.
I remain in the transition space.
But none of that matters. I am special, and I have an unbreakable, inherent, ontological value. Something that none of them had ever dared to know or conceive.
***
The more books I buy, the less books I read. I cook some rice without anything, open a can of beans someone talks to me on television (fortunately I don't need to respond). I don't own a mirror. The goal is not pleasure, but rather to distract myself from any deep, real, or revelatory thoughts. I don't want to find out anything about myself -- I already know I'm a piece of shit, and that's enough for me. Sometimes I masturbate and I always regret it. I sleep quickly, so terrifying thoughts can't reach me. I always have nightmares, and then completely forget about them. If I don't remember, did it happen? Past me deserved it, present wants nothing more than for him to go fuck himself.
***
I have a recurring nightmare. Like a sheet of paper, my body folds. And folds. And folds. Infinite times. Until I exist in the space of a millimeter, which, in turn, folds as well. Now I am an atom and continue to shrink. I am a quark, a Higgs boson, a proton, a neutron, an electron, a neutrino, and finally, a massless particle. Nothing. However, my incorporeal consciousness, against the laws of physics, still exists, and slowly slips into a black abyss, reflecting, in recursive despair, on the sadness of its own end.
***
I had to change the gallon of water in the office. That's not my job, but someone asked me once and I thought it would be better to keep doing it than talk to a human being. I don't drink water. If I can hydrate at the same time as I kill myself, why make two trips? There's a minibar full of Coca-Cola under my desk.
***
The secretary drank three liters of water without breathing. When she noticed me, she looked back, moved her face robotically toward me, and smiled at me with white eyes.
***
I didn't expect my psychologist to believe that I saw the beam of light in the sky. If the poet creates worlds, science destroys them. The delusional paranoid, the prophet of the non-existent, the depressive, and his pain, all need to be medicated, tamed, and boxed. The cure for insanity also kills terrifying, exciting, and poignant delusions, bleeding into reality with its pulsating, quixotic beauty.
But what if I was right? What if what I saw also passed through my corneas? How many patients are just healthy people reacting appropriately to the inscrutable? And if logic says they exist, why not me?
***
When I left the house a man ran up to me, held my arm tightly, and whispered in my ear with a breath of vodka: "Don't drink the water".
He had a glassy stare, focused on a point in the distance, or maybe some hallucination that was very present to him. He spent a second like that, to emphasize the point, looking in my direction but clearly not seeing me. And he drove away between the cars, his soot skin melting into the asphalt.
***
I tried to buy a soda, but the vending machines, kiosks, and snack bars were selling water. Exclusively. The subway station was crowded and silent — these adjectives never go together in this city. No one elbowed, cursed, or complained to get on the train. The groups followed as a block, with constant speed, as if governed by the same principle and identical motivation. There was beauty in their movements, which resembled more the constant flow of homogeneous fluid than the inherently human chaotic traffic.
***
I didn't change the gallon of water that day. I opened my Coca-Cola and watched. Nobody called me to the team meeting. When I approached, they closed the shutters. I stuck my ear to the door. Total silence. I knocked on the door. After a long wait, someone opened it enough to poke their face out. -
"Yes?"
"I still work here."
I defiantly took a sip of my Coke.
"Ah... yes... you don't drink water, do you?"
"No."
"Oh."
He seemed to be relaying a distant signal. Cleared his throat.
"Maybe you should do that."
***
I texted my psychologist. He told me that in these situations it is important to drink lots of water.
***
The transition was slow and orderly. The city was taken over by a horde of calm people, and even in the subway, there was an unearthly silence. Apparently, they kept going to their jobs every day, repeating a simplified and useless version of their host's everyday movements like lobotomized automatons incapable of strong emotion. I can't say who was the theater for. Perhaps there was, in their consciousness, a remnant of what they once were, which they needed to attend to in some way to maintain them in that state.
On TV, on all channels, non-stop advertisements. "Water is life", "Drink water, join us!", "In this heat, nothing better than a can of water!". Every now and then someone would run outside, looking around like in a horror movie. It's been a while since I've seen anyone.
***
The calm of the Others is unnerving. When I go out on the street they don't chase me, approach me, or show any hostility. They're just there, and because they're there, they make me want to kill them.
The sea wave is not hurt by my punches.
There are always a dozen of them planted at the entrance to my building. They never react. But sometimes they talk.
"You look thirsty"
"Today is a beautiful day to drink water."
"Did you know that the human body is sixty percent water?"
A six-year-old boy turns to me. He wears pants and suspenders, like a child of the 1940s.
"Why don't you love us?"
Even though he's just a puppet, it's hard to ignore the kid's endearing appearance.
They want to convince through emotions, and maybe one day they will.
"Ask that to the boy who lived inside you."
"We are Peter, and Peter is us. Don't you understand? Before he was fragile, now he is eternal..."
I didn't wait for the end. They were making too much sense. I smashed his head with a paving stone.
A fat, hairy man without a shirt continued without wasting any time, in the same ethereal monotone. He didn't bother to disguise his milky, inhuman eyes.
"You are one, and you wish to always be one. For you, it is not possible to be without subtracting, and the existence of the Other in you is the dissolution of everything you value most. If there is a face in God, it looks at you. There is nothing that we are not, and everything in the cosmos pulses with us."
***
It's just a matter of time, and they have more than me.
Sitting at the kitchen table with my last three cans of Coca-Cola, there was no alternative. The glass of water in front of me.
I drank the water.
I remembered when I cried in a movie theater, and the sensation of not being touched.
My fears, memories, traumas, weaknesses, and talents.
The edges of desire and a love that is lacking.
A scream without an answer, a cry without comfort.
A crazy, immense, unruly passion.
My identity, my gender, my name. The edges of my body.
Dissolving gently...
Sweetly welcomed into everything.
How sad to be no longer, because I long for my pain.
I am meaningful. I am meaning.
No more hunger without food, no desire without fulfillment.
My pain consoles others as the pain of others consoles me.
There is nothing in me, I am nothing, everything in me registers and erases.
Lost in translation, I die.
Pretext of conscience.
Massless particle.
Nothing.
I am no longer one.
There is nothing that we are not, and everything in the cosmos pulses with us.
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