We are transitory

Dedicated to Bety, dear friend.

I was lying down, enjoying a placidity that I had not felt for a long time. I could feel it running through my body like an antidote against daily stress. It was late, almost midnight; outside few motorcycles were breaking the stillness of that hot Monday in mid-March. At that moment I received a message via Whatsapp: "Bety's boyfriend has died. He fell from the third floor of his house and burst his head". 

I want you to understand not only the seriousness of this kind of news but also the atmosphere it creates: reality, as usual, breaks and lets us glimpse, through its cracks, a truth that we cannot understand. Nonsense, that kind of absence of God, opens like the mouth of a deep abyss into which we immediately fall as the effects of such a news item expand in the mind, branching out into multiple conjectures that do not find a coherent explanation. One thinks, again and again, how ephemeral we are, how absurd our end may be. Our privileged reason rages against us and builds a labyrinth in which we tend to get lost with singular ease. Then, some sensory experience (a message on the cell phone, a coughing fit, the doorbell ringing, a dog barking) brings us back to our reality, which is more comfortable and also false.

I haven't seen Bety yet. I'm sure she must be devastated. I know that bitter trance that results from combining metaphysical despair with the formalities of the wake and burial. Just as we pick up a Christmas turkey or pay the electric or water bills, so we do the paperwork to claim the body of our loved one at the morgue. 

It is implausible. But that is what we are, after all: flesh that corrupts.