Last update: February 25, 2017
Don't ask me how or why, but one August night I found myself lying in front of the sea looking at the moon next to a stranger.
We could have rolled in the sand, as a man and a woman usually would in such a scenario, but it didn't happen. We limited ourselves to discussing what the strange phenomenon was that the moon was not totally full or why it was waxing or waning. After all, each man is in some way fascinated by science, especially by the movements and forms of the white lady.
"He likes me? I like?" I wondered.
Perhaps he has also asked himself the same question.
"These days, when touching on the outside is now taken for granted and no longer has any value, touching on the inside has become the most coveted and difficult product to buy."
Fleeting contacts to sate an insatiable hunger
So much coveted, that many try to compensate for it with fleeting, compulsive contacts, in an attempt to feed a hunger that never completely satiates and that makes the belly grumble. It is a sound that takes on the tones of an inner lament, leaving us half deaf even if we no longer even pay attention to it.
Perhaps in our attempt to get beyond our skins, that night it occurred to us to draw our caricatures on a mobile phone app, to trace in a ridiculous way the steps of assembling an “ikea” piece of furniture on the sand, to dodge the beach cleaning machine.
A strange means of locomotion that came and went with puffs of air of other times, while we chatted or kept silent, occasionally sniffing our hands, as if still looking for traces of the sardine skewers that we had just devoured, like cats voracious. How strange it is sometimes to be with a stranger.
"It was then that I realized that even more strange is being a stranger to oneself, but this, whether we see it or not, is a shadow that never leaves us."
Suddenly, the moon enveloped us in a beam of light, as if we were actors who had just stepped onto a stage. I don't know if it happened just before his words, or at the same time, the fact is that from the sweet noise of our conversation this sentence emerged: “Sometimes I am with myself, others, I am alone”. It was then that I looked at him and, without knowing why, I knew he was no longer a stranger.
Connections turn strangers into a place to know
I drove him home and, when I turned off the car to say goodbye, something even stranger happened: I felt my skin. I don't know how but he touched me inside, with a little caress, like a note on a guitar string that makes the wood vibrate. So my skin thundered. We were like two teenagers who attract each other like magnets in a car, in the background a classical guitar as a soundtrack.
I don't know if it's because I haven't kissed anyone in a long time or if I always did it with my five senses asleep, but her lips looked sweet and magnetic to me.
Summer is over and we have never seen each other again. But that doesn't matter.
“The sense of things is not defined by its duration. It has an indefinite space and time "
Anyway, I can't stop telling myself that there is nothing stranger than feeling strangers next to someone, even with ourselves, and then in a moment we find ourselves, without knowing why, in a kind of house, a temple, which leaves us amazed, but which unites us, reunites us, with ourselves and with the world.
It can even be a fraction of a second in which there are no thoughts that are worth, and here we are catapulted back into the cocoon of our childhood, when everything turned into magic and we could only feel, dream, live.
Because magic, dear readers, exists. If you don't believe it, wait for a moonlit night and watch it next to a stranger, even if that stranger is yourself or the one you think you have known all your life.
