Unsent Letters #28

And you know what the perfect nightmare would be?

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear E.,

The night before you were born, I saw a million fireflies. I watched them through the car window while waiting for the electric gate to close behind me. It was unusually hot and humid for a late May night. When you were little, I always asked where you were hiding before you were born, and you would answer, In Bambi's forest. And then what happened?, I asked further. Then a voice called me and said, “Your family is waiting for you. Are you ready?”.

Once, when you were already six or seven, I kept the conversation going and said: So, you responded that you were ready, I guess. But weren’t you curious to know about your family, about where you were going to end up, before actually responding to the call? We were at Rigoletto, our favorite gelateria at the time, and you were busy licking a huge cone of pistachio and chocolate, your mouth smudged with a thick brown-greenish liquid. You let a solid couple of minutes pass, intent on your grand work of containing the melting cream, but I knew you were thinking.

Then you looked up from the cone and said, I don’t remember. You paused, as if the question had floated away before you could catch it, your gaze drifting past me. Everyone ends up somewhere, you added, before returning to the task of saving what was left of your gelato, already lost to gravity and the sun. I remember the air around us seemed to shift, as if your words, so simple, so final, had untied something amid the hum of distant voices and the clink of spoons on glass cups. You were speaking from some distant place that you seemed to understand instinctively, like it was all a game to you. I watched, silent, and somehow knew that whatever I’d asked no longer mattered, like a forgotten detail in an old photograph.

Everyone ends up somewhere. You have no idea how many times I’ve thought back to that moment, and those four words. Bambi’s forest, an immense and mysterious sorting center, where you wait to be assigned a life. Everyone ends up somewhere when the voice calls a name you don’t yet have -- a universal name, the name of your consciousness, the one that remains until the end of time -- and the moment has come. Do you realize how wonderful and powerful, yet delicate and discrete, this small, simple story of you waiting in Bambi’s forest is? A story you made up when you were, perhaps, three, and that has stayed with us ever since. On the phone yesterday, I brought it up. Then you said that, coincidentally, you were talking about it earlier with I forget who, and my heart skipped a beat. There’s an invisible thread connecting us.

And you know what the perfect nightmare would be? If one day I received an email from an unknown address with a video attached, and after a moment of natural hesitation, I decided to watch it, and the video showed a vast forest, with dense trees and just a sliver of natural light filtering in, and in this vast forest, I saw you, or your consciousness -- an entity without shape, color, or smell, unrecognizable to anyone but me -- standing still, waiting to be called and sent somewhere, assigned to a life, the first available life, and I witnessed the exact moment when a voice asked if you were ready, a rhetorical question because when they ask if you’re ready, you have to be, there’s no other choice, and so I watched the exact moment when that voice from nowhere called you and said that your family was waiting for you, because your time had come, and you slipped away, starting your life somewhere else -- not with me. And once the video was over, I ran to find you, and you didn’t exist, but I knew who you were, I knew that you existed, I knew what you were like, and I knew your scent, your voice, and all our little stories. But there was no trace of you.

So I wandered through the empty spaces of my mind, retracing memories like footsteps, searching for echoes of your words and laughter that once fluttered in the air. But each moment I grasped slipped through my fingers like grains of sand. I imagined the life you had been assigned while I stood here, stranded in a silence that filled the immense void you left behind. The world outside moved on, oblivious to my personal, inexplicable tragedy. And I wondered if you ever thought of me, if in some parallel existence you ever had déjà vu’s, or if you’d truly vanished into the shadows, leaving only whispers and flashes of images.

Reassure me, then, because an obscure mail is already sitting in my inbox, from an unknown sender. And I see there’s an attachment. But I won’t open it until I hear back from you.

Please, send me a sign. Or a million fireflies.

---

"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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