When I opened my eyes I felt disoriented, around something like bubbles swirled furiously before my eyes. I was alive? Or I was dead? In that moment of sheer panic actually these questions echoed in the ether of an oblivion that, at least in appearance, it was all in my head. I could hear the sounds, similar to those that produces a stomach churning. I felt the soft touch of water on the skin, or at least what I thought was water. I could see the blue spectral ocean under me and I tasted the salt of a life that no longer belonged to me. I recalled like photographic and colorful illustrations like paintings, indistinct moments where I appeared happy, then sad and yet happy, but they were confused and decontextualized. I could almost have been born at the time; although not entirely true; of having breathed for the first time; even though I had a hunch that it was not; and having looked at the world through the eyes of a child; although now I knew to be like an old man.
I do not remember who was who told me, but I know I have known a long time. Ah ... now I remember. He was my friend, I think. He said one day something that I struggled to understand, in hindsight I realized that he was right. He said something that I will bring now easily and almost irrational level, to my present condition: How do you know that the world began millions of years ago? If the world existed only from few days and everything that you imagine being far, it was simply a thought, an idea?
I know it's hard to imagine or understand, probably the fear now gripped my mind and I can hardly produce a more logical or concrete thinking. I’m sinking. Suddenly I get pushed upwards from where the light comes, I feel that my skin changes. I transmute. I’m changing, as in a dream when at some point you realize that it is not really you, but someone else, and you see the world through glazed eyes. So I let myself be carried away, and suddenly I was thrown out into the water. When I was outside, outdoors, millions of small drops of water splashed everywhere creating a mantle of infinite possibilities.
I look down and saw my feet, just that they were not feet, but a huge and bluish fin, like a whale. It was not encouraging, it was as if at the end I had known to be really so. My child's body was reflected in the bright mirror of crystal clear water and the face, my face, smiled as if trying to cheer me up. Just as I got used to that face it began to change. Now I was a young woman, beautiful, with blacks eyes and dark hair. Never been so beautiful. I thought, but I changed again and this time I was a woman wrinkled with discolored hair, but still it was not enough to scare me. Only when I was almost more than half of the jump and the water level began to get closer and closer, I began to fear that I would soon be seen. An old lady staring at me with the look of one who does not fear death, but on the contrary now fears life. The impact with the water was terrible, though I didn’t the pain, and even the terror of it. It was awful because I began to understand, because not always the knowledge leads to happiness I felt again that sensation, that of the water on my skin and the salt in my mouth. I was still spinning, like a snake chasing its tail. I was running around in circles forever? How long would I chase my tail? And above all, would I find out where I was and who I was?
I jumped and dived back into the water countless times, I could not say how many because I stopped counting after the fortnight and despite the turn had made me nauseous, I gave in to it, and especially the feeling of being alone. An exile from my world, from my home, from my life, but especially from my body, and sooner or later I knew it would also happen to my thoughts.
I was like a perfect and curvy whale but unable to communicate with fellows whales because I was silent. I was condemned to wander alone in the ether and soon my thoughts would come together to it, in a perpetual search for something compulsive without rhyme or reason. I was seized by a moment of despair, where I discovered that I wasn’t even able to cry, my body was no longer in my control and as an astronaut who loses his balance and spins in space, I also would have shot in circle forever, changing from fish to woman and woman to fish for eternity.
I decided to surrender to this condition, eternity certainly would have been much tougher while reflecting on my life, and especially of that immutable condition, so I closed my eyes and let the darkness wrapped me, legs first, then the hip all the way up to the neck and even higher up on the tip of the nose and at the end of my mind, and at last I was plunged into darkness, no more questions nor answers.
Exiled forever.
Story by Nicole Bellini