And he wakes.
He has to pee.
He takes the urinal, pees, wipes himself.
He cannot fall asleep again.
He doesn’t want to revisit the last months: the projects; the relationships; what he must do; what he could do; what he ought to do; what he will not do.
But the spiraling starts anyway…
Books have always been his refuge, although as a child he didn’t read much.
He remembers tales and legends from distant places: he understood, then, that they were different ways of telling similar truths.
He rewrote his past to invent himself a personal legend.
He had been abandoned in forests; rescued from floods; he found treasures and forgotten cities; saved princesses; defeated monsters…
But he couldn’t manage to accumulate more than fifteen years of exploits.
So he opened the door to eternity and sought past lives: he analyzed thoughts with Plato and Socrates; shared a workshop with Leonardo da Vinci; watched Don Quixote charge at windmills and be hurled through the air; helped Jason recover the Golden Fleece…
Later he added Hanuman; the monk Xuanzang; mountain ranges disappearing into the horizon; oceans crossed in a canoe under the guidance of stars…
Relaxed by his children’s breathing, he realizes that he has never again felt the need to invent past lives.
Curiously, now, in Chile, so many people speak of theirs, of the weight they carry, of how those pasts shape this life.
He doesn’t feel the need.
He arrived at a conclusion perhaps exaggerated: he comes from nothingness and to nothingness he will return.
The past weighs; the future is uncertain; and — with these broken feet — that sentence cannot be more literal.
A pale light filters through the window.
It is time to wake the children.
The house begins its routine.
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