I remember, as if through haze, the last summer before I die.
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It was somehow unusual, blurry, like my life those days.
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And not just mine…
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I was very ill back then, so to me, I guess, it seemed that the whole lead
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celestial vault lay on my chest and didn’t let me breathe.
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The rain, that fell almost every day, was bluntly drumming on the metal window
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sill, like those hollow snare drums before the execution, writing out some
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strange arabesques on the misty panes, — messages from that world,
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understandable only to me.
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I knew that the end was nigh.
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And amazingly, I wasn’t sad about leaving, although I loved life above all.
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The beautiful one, joyful and careless, my children, friends.
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And you, of course, who, even for yourself didn’t know why, inertly came and
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sat by my grave for a while, told me the tidings, or just remained in wistful
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silence, made a sigh and left…
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What else?
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You, certainly, don’t know anything about death.
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I didn’t know either, until I came here.
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Now I know what I — with a certain remorse — only guessed: that living is
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insolence.
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Prodigal, gratuitous conceit.
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Temptation, which is hard to resist.
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And the All-maker himself wanted it thus, implanting to every living being a
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desperate resistance towards death, although he knew it was inevitable.
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I’m lying here, in the rake of dark, and I still don’t understand why did he
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give the joy and the torture of living, when he exactly determined the end to
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us all???
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And when and what it will be like.
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And now…
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now it’s like I’ve never been ill at all.
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Admittedly, it’s a bit dull, but I’ll get used to it.
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I’ve met some neighbours, they explained it to me, — it needs a certain amount
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of time to pass until the soul abandons the body and leaves…
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there, upstairs.
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They’re all, together with me, on that trial internship.
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Waiting.
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Only later does the decay begin.
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Then we won’t be able to converse.
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Bones don’t speak.
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You asked me once, — when we theoretically, dare I say, philosophically,
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talked about death, like something abstract and very distant from us,
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— do I believe in afterlife?
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It was a notional mistake: Life exists only on the other side of the line;
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over here is resting, stout and unshadowed silence, in which we wait to become
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what we were meant to be — dust in cosmic infinity.
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Do you remember that grey dove that persistently came to our window and
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patiently waited with its dark little eyes, like the head of a thumbtack?
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Half-jokingly we were saying that she, maybe, was my mother, killed during the
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war…
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and, really, it seemed, while she twirled her head, that she was asking me: «How are you, child?
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Are you well?» |
— and she never receded from the window sill, like a watch-guard,
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as if she was taking care of me.
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Afterwards, she unexpectedly disappeared.
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You’ll laugh, but I, deep inside, started to believe that it was Her and I was
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saddened that she was gone.
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She came back a year later, when I’ve gotten ill.
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She didn’t move away from the window since.
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Up until I died.
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She no longer comes, you say? |
…
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I don’t know, it’s kind of confusing…
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Maybe those stories aren’t just morbid nonsense.
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Maybe I’ll, someday, become, let’s say, some puppy that you’ll take for
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yourself in your isolation, that you’ll coddle and feed, and it will love you
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the way I loved you.
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Silently and devotedly.
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Like «an intern» that doesn’t know where his soul will be.
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I’m waiting for a schedule.
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After that, you won’t have to come anymore; |
we might meet somewhere else.
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If that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter.
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A man is definitely dead when he’s forgotten. |