57

Silence.

It’s midnight. I am sitting in the place where I sit when the world needs to go back to spinning in the right direction. Those are places that have a built-in button, the one used to return to the preceding song. You push it and the world goes back into place. You push it and the problem not only disappears, it never existed. In short: those are places that don’t exist. That place is a red bench along a river. A place only I know. And Silvia.

I hold my head in my hands, as best I can with my arm in a cast … and I haven’t stopped crying since I ran away. Yes, because I ran away from my dream. My crushed-up dream. In my hands, I tightly hold the letter for Beatrice written by Silvia; it is soaked in my tears. I tear it into a thousand pieces with my teeth and my good hand. I scatter the pieces in the river’s current. There lies my black soul. My scribed soul.

And now all the pieces of my soul are there drowning in the current, and each one goes its own way, and no one will ever be able to gather them together, no one. I am drowning in each of those pieces of paper. I am drowning a million times. Now my soul no longer exists. The current carried it off. I want to be alone. In silence. My cell phone is off. I want the entire world to suffer because it doesn’t know where I’ve ended up. I want the entire world to feel as alone and abandoned as I do right now. Without Beatrice, who is dying, without hair. Without Beatrice, who isn’t going to make it. And I didn’t even recognize the other half of my dream. I ran away from the girl I wanted to protect my whole life. I am a coward.

I do not exist.

God does not exist.