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BACK TO REALITY: HOLIDAYS BLUES


London is sleeping like me. Is it the weather? Is it the heat? What is this stillness in the air?
‘Writing or not writing?’ asks herself the author. My holiday is over. I am frozen between the slow life I’ve left behind and the fast rhythm awaiting for me at each corner. I am resisting, I’m not ready yet for the life I’ve left behind.
My old life seems so remote at the moment. I want to protract the feeling of my holidays ad infinitum and keep it in my circulatory system; I want to hold on to the slow pace, the smell of fresh air and flowers. I’m not ready for choking, for the intoxicating pollution and the irritating allergies. I am not ready for work. I am not ready for anything. I want to climb inside a cocoon and spend winter there when it arrives, and make no mistakes, it will be here sooner than you think with the dark days and the grey sky, with the relentless rain and the slippery streets.

Who wants to go out? Nobody does, we don’t. We pretend we are alive; we stay in bed and send our clones outside, they might look like us but they’re just an identical copy of our true self, without blood, without warmth, without hearts. It works well and nobody notices the difference; meanwhile under the blankets we sleep like bears for months and months, we dream and sleepwalk, we lose our colour and put on wait, while our temperature drops to keep us at a low metabolic rate. We are mammals, and mammals, above all, enjoy sleeping and resting. Being a mammal is a drawback but we don’t talk about it. It’s in our nature to be lazy: it’s not our fault.

If we belonged to the birds or ants family it would be an entirely different story, but we don’t. To compensate our inefficiency we feel guilty - but we shouldn’t because we are mammals and it’s in our nature to be lazy, sleepy and slow – so we push ourselves so hard that we get hart attacks and all kinds of deceases: of the physical kind, the psychological kind, the heart kind; and if that doesn’t work we go a bit crazy. If that doesn’t work either, we go completely crazy.

When we go completely crazy we have lost it and we have lost:  because at this point it doesn’t matter what you do, you are no longer in charge, your clone will be replaced by an avatar, but not of your own choice, this time, it will be the doctor’s choice and you’ll have to remain inside your body: a prison more secure than Alcatraz. Slowly the avatar will take over but never completely, you will still be observing it from the inside out through the slots of you eyes. The avatar is now you, but you are not the avatar. Eventually you’ll play chess together to decide who is staying and who is going; then, all of a sudden the little corpse inside you will remember to be a mammals and with a big roar will scare the avatar and the doctor away leaving only an apple a day.

(If you have been on holidays and feel same as me: WELCOME BACK TO REALITY)
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