by Viola Victor
27 - Koibito
Martina had the idea that it was necessary to destroy the flower. I agreed with her, but she didn’t seem truly convinced. There was something that held her back, that prevented her from truly wanting its extinction. After all, the flower was a possibility. Maybe right, maybe not. But destroying it meant depriving us of it completely, once and for all: no looking back.
What would you do, faced with the possibility of knowing how your past lives were and, most importantly, how future ones will be? I have no doubts: I give up. What purpose could it ever serve? When I am born again, I will not remember anything of today, of now. Not even that I peeked at the future. The only life it would effect would be this one, and it’s not sure that it would be a positive effect. If I’ll be happy, I rejoice. But if I’ll be unhappy, I don’t want to spoil these present days because of a future ghost.
I was afraid that Martina thought the same way but could not resist the temptation.
"This story of the flower is absolutely crazy. Absurd, improbable. Do you think it is all true? What if uncle made up everything? If it was a bad joke?" she asked doubtfully, in front of the terrace of flowers that we had before us and that would not survive much longer, at least in our intentions.
"If so, how do you explain our dreams?"
"I don’t know. There could be many explanations, it must not necessarily be as uncle wrote. Maybe we don’t know why it happens, but there is another explanation. We’re simply not able to find it. He might have made everything up, right?"
"Yes, he might. It may be pure invention. A hallucinogen flower, nothing more."
"No, nothing more."
"But even then, we have to get rid of it. We cannot keep it here, don’t you think?"
"Yes, you're right. We’ll destroy it. And what if uncle hasn’t made up anything, anyway? If it were all true?"
"If it were all true, it would be a weird thing. Really weird. Be reborn? What does it mean? In short, who would tell you that it is really you? I am not sold."
"It's like Paradise. Who tells you that the one going to Paradise is really you? You just know, right? What a question! As if there was a way to determine if a person is just herself. So how do you know that it will truly be you to wake up tomorrow in the bed where you fell asleep?"
There was something that did not convince me, but I didn’t know what it was. Thinking tired me: following the thread, I reached a point where it was twisted and turned into an inextricable knot. This is why thinking wasn’t the best thing I could do: when I came to the knot, hard as I tried to unravel it, there was nothing I could do. So I, almost two meters tall and with a large presence, stopped in front of a ball of thread that was impossible to disentangle, big or small that it was, and had to stop or go back.
"You're right," I admitted.
"As usual."
"As usual. But I think there is something incomprehensible in this story, that it isn’t possible to clarify, try hard as we might."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that our head is made of only a small part of the matter in the universe, isn’t it? Therefore inside there is only room for a small part of everything. Even understanding: we can understand only a small part, because we are made of small parts. It is useless to try to grab the rest."
"I'm not following you. For a change, you are extremely convoluted."
"I mean this: you know what the word infinity means, and eternal too, right?"
"Right."
"But when you try to imagine it, understand it, I mean really, fully understanding it, how this infinity is, you cannot. Universe is infinite? What does it mean? A vacuum that never ends? A full that never ends? And what does never mean? The truth is that time doesn’t exist. And maybe not even space. Can there be a moment when it all started? But if it's a moment, there's a before. Then there was time before. And even before the before, ad infinitum. But what is infinity, we cannot understand it. And so eternity. If we want to be logical, it's all a terrible contradiction."
"My head is spinning! What crazy things you say!"
"Because our head is too small to hold all these things. Beyond our limits there is the truth. And perhaps, beyond that limit, not even the concept of truth makes sense. Because it would be everything and nothing simultaneously. What do you say? It’s absurd? Yeah, it must be so. All terribly absurd. But never mind. Now we're here. Isn’t it comforting? We have the lighthouse, the sea. Don’t worry about what will be, it would do us no good. Being here and now, this is the secret of everything. At least, that's all we have."
"All we have."
And then we destroyed the white flower. Koibito.
But I believe that Martina salvaged one and kept looking. Looking ahead. I don’t know if that made her happy, but I don’t think so: future ghosts are somehow cartilage that is difficult to dissolve, as if it were pure spirit. It is easier to believe in their existence, and they are more difficult to banish.
