Foto de Kate Russell en Unsplash
"The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. "
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
At times, during some wild storms, complex questions crop up and change the way we feel about life and death and the people who surround us. Once we are thrown out of a whirlpool, we are not the same person. In order for this to happen, a storm must be unruly, powerful, unpredictable, and it must totally change the natural order of all that our life has been made of, in such a way that the landscape inside us and the one outside are utterly unrecognizable. Amidst such a tempest, our race breeds a sort of obsession for the first and the last time, for all our beginnings and endings; the first step and our last one, the first word we utter and the last one.
When young, the horizon spreads so vastly, so open and clear in front of us that death really has the same meaning as the sky, or the sun. It coexists with us without any deeper meaning to it. Death does not concern us and never will. The same as a woman who is to have a child, never thinking about all the pain that all the rest of the women survived. We never think it might come to us. It is a concept of collective pain, somehow shared among all of us, but it never really reaches "Me". Until someone dies. Until it hurts. Then it all comes to us, one way or the other. It comes round to us. People have children, women suffer by giving birth. People die. People whom we love die, people whom we hate also die. In one hundred years, all the people you see around you will die. Vanish into dust. Including you and me.
On my shelf, in front of some old books, lie a few diaper creams forgotten. I have been observing them for a while. When was the last time I used them on my boy? It must be months ago. One morning, maybe, after having a coffee, I changed that last diaper that he had used only during the night. Maybe one evening, he fell asleep, and I changed that last diaper he has ever used as a baby boy. I haven't noticed it. It all passed without any fuss, it didn't matter. Had I known it, would I have cried over it?
The last time I made love to my husband. Why does it matter so much, after all those times we were together? Then again, it does matter now that he is dead.
I can't define with words the slippery feeling of escape all has, the sneaky subconscious notion of how everything escapes us in this inexorable flow of life and death.
I am a witness and as a witness I wish to be aware of it all. I wish to understand the magnitude of seeing my son's first step, of a man falling in love, of someone losing his mind. It is disgusting to be a witness and not to be aware of it.
Our race is condemned, hopeless. Even so, while we live, we are witnesses to each other, we form a part of the cosmic consciousness' breath. Our only trail is a bit of condensation on the glass. Nevertheless, I want to leave it there, for my son, for my life after death, for the Universe. I want to be aware.
Spot on, we have sacrificed it, and it is the cancer of our world today. We have sacrificed our awareness and exchanged it for the news, contents, reels, screens, parcels, payments, transfers and all the other nuisances, noise and obstacles. Don't forget the applications for which parents spend one morning in their childrens' schools trying to crack the password because the teacher won't communicate with you in any other way. A paper note is not enough anymore, an email is not formal enough, not official enough, but an application with a password! Notifications don't work, so you have to think about it every day and open it, have another lousy line on your mental list that you have to think about daily. Instead, a note in my son's rucksack would be quite enough for me. He is 4 years old. Please, cut the crap.
We stopped being aware, and we have lost all the time we had to develop it. It blinds us to our own children. We don't see them when they enter the room, not through our full awareness. Beautiful men and women pass next to us, we don't notice them. We are not witnesses and we don't play the role. That is a fact that will hurt us more collectively, a deep and bloody wound circling us in a womb-like space. Given that our humanity was given the only real gift by the appalling universe, we are endlessly stupid to forget it. A gift of a dream, of mist. A possibility to be aware in a dream and play the role we were given until we wake up and die. We have an opportunity of leaving a trace of condensation on a window. It won't last, I dare not lie here. Nevertheless, it is all we have got and all we were given. A journey from the beginning until the end. We cannot afford to lose the only true mystic dimension of our unfathomable souls, because it forms part of something endless, unstoppable and dreadful. Our past and our future might depend on it, considering the journey does not go forward, it is not a straight line. Time is not a straight line. Straight lines do not exist. We bend backwards and forwards, our awareness rewrites the past and the future, if there are such places at all.
Our now is literally all we were and all we will ever be.
Marina Zrnic
04/10/2026
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