Unsent Letters #33

Between sense, nonsense, and a wish for the year to come

Photo by Dawid Kochman on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear E.,

I decided to write to you on New Year’s Day because there are things that have been crossing my mind since early this morning, things that I want to say but have no one else to say them to. And since you’re so far away, I’ll write stronger, like it says in that famous song from long ago. Stronger, as if my writing were a signal of sorts that needed to be strong enough to reach you on the other side of something, who knows what. Every time I heard that song, I imagined myself writing longhand, pressing down harder and harder. But here I am, typing on my laptop instead of writing longhand, alas, and unless I typed in bold or all caps, there’s no way for me to write stronger. My dad used to write entire emails in all caps, sometimes all caps and bold too, sometimes all caps and bold and in different colors. Until one day I discreetly told him, as discreetly as possible lest it might have come across as offensive or intrusive, which by no means reflected my intention, that typing like that could be possibly decoded by the recipient as if he were yelling at them, maybe even yelling while being mad.

But anyway. I went to bed before eleven last night, and I slept through the fireworks and the chants and the old dishes thrown out the window, things I never understood, not even as a teenager, when all I wanted was to be forgotten in some obscure room with a book, the sound of madness coming in from outside muffled and comfortably distant. And so last night I went straight into a dream of solitude and regret, one that left me anxious for a while. I was in the middle of a black-and-white crowd, but not just any crowd, a crowd made of known faces: immediate family members, relatives, and close friends. And yet, I felt alone. Then I realized they were all cardboard copies of real people, like large photographs of them, frozen in their best pose, smiling an aesthetically pleasant yet sterile smile, as if it had nothing to do with me there, at that moment. Why weren’t they smiling at me? I caught myself asking.

A voice answered that I was too hard to understand and that, instead of making the effort, people preferred to wear a mask concealing their real feelings about me. It’s my fault, I thought; only mine. I could have handled my relationship with these people better from the start, and now it's too late to change everything. Just too late. And then the voice said that things may happen very fast, that time has compressed for everything, that large fortunes have been built in just a few years whereas they would once take decades, if not centuries; hence, the same could be said for human relationships. So why should it be too late? it said. That’s wrong, I thought, because in the case of human relationships, you would have to first erase memories, and then, and only then, proceed with starting over and rebuilding. But that’s utopian, as memories can’t be erased. Only death can erase memories, I thought. And I felt discouraged, empty, useless. Until I woke and felt wrapped in a vague sense of anxiety, like gauze over my eyes, that tapered off toward mid-morning.

What made it all go away was an old song by Eugenio Finardi titled Extraterrestre. It came out in seventy-eight, when I had just turned a double-digit age, and like with most things that hit me during that time, I wasn’t interested and it took at least a decade for me to get into it. The song says that there was this guy who lived in an attic so he could always be close to the sky, and at night, lying on his bed and staring at the stars through the window in the roof, he sent out a message, hoping to make contact with extraterrestrials. He said: Extraterrestrial, take me away. I want a star that’s mine alone. Extraterrestrial, come and get me. I want a planet where I can start over. And the extraterrestrial arrived and granted his wish, and in an instant he was transported, painlessly, to an unknown planet, where the sky was a little more purple than usual, the sun a little warmer, and the air had a pleasant taste -- an entire planet just for him to play with. But, after a while, he felt a bitterness growing inside because, now that his goal had been achieved, he still felt empty and realized that nothing had changed within him, that his fears hadn’t gone away, and that perhaps they’d even increased, amplified by solitude. And so he started wanting to make contact with the extraterrestrial again to ask to be taken back home. And I don’t know why, but hearing these words and his voice and the music, put me in a good mood and filled me with conviction that this will be a positive year. What do I want for it to be positive? you might ask.

A long time ago, a gentleman of a certain age -- he could have been between fifty and sixty, but to me at the time, that was the age of an elderly person, also because he looked like an elderly person, probably worn down by a thousand worries -- stopped me on the street and told me that his life was full of problems. Endless legal disputes, bills to pay, no job and therefore no income, money running out, a huge and demanding house he had inherited from his parents who had passed away a few years earlier, less-than-ideal relationships with his siblings, an inability to commit to new projects or even to try pursuing the simplest dream, a marriage that had ended years prior, two children who were slowly becoming strangers, and poor health, likely (or perhaps mainly) due to everything he had just mentioned. And he said, I’m sorry for telling you all this, but last night my father came to me in a dream and told me that when you have problems, you need to talk about them, you shouldn’t keep them bottled up inside, and you need to talk about them with people who have nothing to do with you, complete strangers, people who don’t know a single thing about you or your story, because the key to solving a problem (he said the key, I remember it vividly) is to look at it with detachment, from the outside, from a place of non-involvement. He said, he continued, that only someone who isn’t involved can have a clear view of the problem, and only someone with a clear view of the problem can find its solution. And he said all this while he smiled a natural, reassuring smile, he concluded. I was pressed for time and got distracted by a car that I thought was honking at me, and when I turned back around to look at the gentleman, he was gone.

Today, many years later, I find myself almost in the same situation as that elderly gentleman. As if that encounter had been a kind of premonition, a projection of what my life would be like three decades later, almost a warning of a scenario that would unfold. And while I was walking, listening to Extraterrestre and reflecting on the song’s intrinsic message, that you can escape to another planet but cannot escape yourself, that encounter came back to my mind, and I thought that life, this life, my life, is nothing but a series of lessons designed specifically for me. By whom, it doesn’t matter. Lessons about what? Lessons about serenity, the meaning of serenity, the value of serenity. Without problems, serenity doesn’t exist because you don’t understand its meaning, let alone its value. But serenity, my dear friend, has an infinite value.

And this is what I want from the year to come.

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"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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