They speak to us

   If you stand in the bridge, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You have to walk south, by the great way. It’s a rather short walk. On the left bank, you will see a beautiful meadow plagued with trees that are not tall or especially beautiful. However, if you walk across the meadow, close to a wall that limits the growth of plants, you will see a small hill and three trees on top of it. The one with the straightest trunk, clean leaves, and no roots on sight, is the one I want to tell you about.

 Beneath that tree, a friend of mine was buried a long time ago. He was not especially strong or fit or brave. He was not particularly remarkable in any way. He was just my friend and that is the reason why that tree is so special to me. I’ve been there many times, at night and during the day, a few minutes and also several hours. And every single time I visit that place, I talk to my friend. Sometimes there is nothing to say, other times it’s different. It changes, as life happens to be.

 I like that meadow because the sunset look gorgeous from it, the golden rays from the sun seem to be touching your body in such a magical way. Even when it rains, the green field looks as if it had escaped a book of fantastical stories. It’s the kind of place where, in stories, ladies and lords encounter beautiful white unicorns and heroes lift a sword out of a stone. I wonder if thing like that have actually happened there but maybe it’s best not to know for certain and just imagine.

 It feels good to be there, laying on the grass and just hearing the wind caressing the greenery. Flowers are scarce but when you find one, it is sure to be one of the most beautiful botanical being your eyes have ever seen. So many colors and such beautiful designs. They make you realize how perfect nature is and how intricate life can be in order to create things that have apparently little to no value. That’s how simpleminded and stupid humans are, because we just do not understand.

 I’m not saying I do understand but, when I’m there, I do feel different than usual. Sometimes I feel my muscles are stronger than ever and some other times I feel it is my mind that has grown one full size, in intellectual terms. I have attributed this particular feeling to the fact that my friend is there, beneath the tree or maybe inside of it. I have a special connection with that place, that goes far beyond it’s location or the many ways the sun touches the leaves and the rain flows down the small hills. It’s just something that I will never be able to understand or explain.

 I never go to two of my favorite places at once but I do have another natural space where I like to relax my aching bones. It’s a prairie, many hours away by walking from the meadow. It’s on the outskirts of civilization and maybe that’s the reason why it feels so special. It might also be the fact that many great people died there a long time ago and the place became a graveyard, although not on purpose. There’s not a sign labeling it as such and there are not tombstones to read.

 You feel the presence of thousands of soul when you enter the prairie. That one, different from the meadow, is filled with flowers all over. As trees are scarce, flowers grow on the ground, big as the fists of a mighty warrior. The colors are unimaginable if one has never been there and the sound of many birds creates a wall of sound that no scream or weapon can pierce. It is very beautiful but it can also be a little bit too much, if the person doesn’t know how to handle it.

 I’ve gone there for many years, from a very young age. Family members were buried there for generations and I feel that my body will also lay beneath the many flowers of the prairie. It’s not a nice thought on my head, but it comforts me that, at the very least, my final resting place could be that beautiful place full of all many of the things that people in other places don’t really have anymore. Birds and flowers are considered wild nowadays and people don’t like that too much.

 There are no hills, no real elevations on that never-ending prairie. There’s just a road on one side and a road on the other. The rest is grass and flowers and birds’ songs. Nothing much besides that. I relax on the meadow but not on the prairie. The prairie makes me think too much sometimes, about my own mortality and about the many things I have yet to do in this life. It makes me feels I have little time, which is true, but I suddenly hear the clock ticking and it’s unbearable.

 When I go, I only stay for a couple of hours and then leave without a prayer or a word. I don’t talk to anyone there, even if a good part of my family’s bones has fed the flowers that live there. I don’t feel comfortable or happy there. But I don’t feel sad or persecuted. It’s just a very strange feeling of not being quite there somehow… I don’t understand it and I just go there when I feel I need to pay my respects, which happens when I take the road north in order to get home after several days of hard labor. I go because I have to, in a certain way, not because I want to.

 My final spot is not very far from home. I live in a beautiful mountain, which oversees the most amazing green valley you have ever seen. Only a small amount of farms break a beautiful natural landscape. The sound of the stream is the one that always tells me I’m only a few minutes away from seeing the faces of my family. When I pass the rushing waters, I can almost feel their skin on my hands, their perfume on my noise and their happy laughs on my ears. It really is home.

 When I’m there, I often take my family to the other side of the mountain. It’s a bit colder and rockier than the place we live in but somehow I really like it. It happens to be the border that separates our country, if one can call it that, from the rest of the world. Beyond the rocks, you can only see the tallest and greenest trees in existence. They make a kind of fabric that extends for several kilometers and then some more. Water can be heard but not seen and animals are the only ones populating it.

 There are no roads that cross it. No one really dares to go through the maze that is the forest. Some daring neighbors love to go there in the summer to pick up grapes, the wild kind, that grow on the outskirts. The yare very sweet and have a beautiful purple color and kind smell. However, wolves have been known to attack people that stay there for too long. It is not a place for humans to thrive. But it’s nice to look at all those leaves from above, while having a warm drink.

 I enjoy the view alone or with my family. We spread mother’s ashes there some three years ago and I still remember how the wind carried the dust the deepest parts of the forest. I stayed there, waiting for the cloud that was my mother to fall on top of the trees but the wind kept on carrying it away, farther and farther away from everything that woman had ever known. It made me think about her and about every single person I had ever met that was not in this world anymore.

 Those are my favorite places on this Earth. They are so different the one from the other but they do share the fact that I feel my people on them, I feel their hearts and minds and, certainly, they souls. They guide me still in this wretched world.

 I know I will become one of them someday. It might be today or tomorrow or in several years. But I know it will happen. In a very strange way, it calms me to know that they are going to be there, on the other side. And I will still be able to visit all my favorite spots.

My choice

   Everything had to be done properly and n the most orderly fashion possible. No loose ends of any type. The first thing was to be sure that I wanted to do it and that was a resounding “yes”, from the very start. The normal thing would be for one to be scared or not sure that that’s the way to go. But I had been thinking about it for so long, that it made o sense to me to do anything else than that. So the first thing was off the table and that made me feel a little bit better about the whole thing.

 Then, planning had to start. Again, I didn’t want to make it messy, I wanted it to be done right, to make people think about what I was thinking and how I felt the moment I did it. It’s not that I wanted anyone to get hurt, but I did want to make them think. You cannot do these things and suddenly forget all of the symbolism such an event had all over it. So I needed to plan everything to the second, even if that meant thinking about it all the time. It was a test to my resolve.

 The supermarket was my first destination. I bought so many things; the cashier girl thought I was a little bit insane. The final tally was very expensive, but I didn’t mind at all, Money had stopped having any importance for me and the plan was all that matter. It was important to make it all as I had imagined so I couldn’t shy away from doing things just because they were expensive or almost impossible in the eyes of most people. I needed to do what I had to do, right then.

 When I came back home with all the things I had bought, I moved on to the second part of my plan: had to cancel everything with my name on it: every credit card, every bank account, every subscription to a magazine or to some email newsletters. Everything had to go. Of course, I couldn’t do all of this in one day but it was very important to just start and get it going. I think that was one of the most difficult things to do in the whole process, before talking to my family of course.

 Friends were very few and a couple of phone calls would be easy to make. But calling my family or talking to them in person was going to be very difficult. I didn’t know if I would be able to stare at them as I talked. Maybe it was better to just stare at the ground and hope for the best. I guess that’s why I kept postponing doing that. It wasn’t really necessary to be honest, but I had always felt hat I owe my family for every single thing they had ever given to me. So the natural thing, specially in this case, was for me to speak to them frankly and without shame,

 Anyway, I left that for the last week. The next few days, I just enjoyed myself thoroughly. I did a number of things I had never done. That was a huge rush, a feeling that made me think that my decision was the right one. I never doubted it for a second and I think many people, in retrospective, think that I was crazy because of that way to react. They thought I should’ve been in the bottom of a well or something like that, nor running around as happy as I had never been before.

 Yes, it was disturbing to me too, but that doesn’t mean it was an improper way to feel. It just meant that I was certain of my decision and that is a very powerful thing. How many people are really certain of the choices they make? How many people doubt once they have decided on something that will undoubtedly change the course of their lives forever? It’s an obvious thing, to doubt and to feel the need to correct oneself. But I never felt that and I’m not ashamed.

 Those days, about two weeks to be exact, were one of the best times in my life and that’s exactly how I wanted it to be. Talking to my friends was not as hard as I thought, maybe because they weren’t many. Of course, they first opposed my decision; they cried and even quarreled with me for a while. But after venting everything, they realized it made sense. Every single part of my plan made sense to them and that made them realize I was right, even if they didn’t agree with everything.

 We had a long good time together, in my house. I invited them offer for a sleepover. We watched lots of movies, ate everything we wanted, talked trash about people we all knew and analyzed our past in the funniest ways. We did avoid talking about the main subject but eventually we just held each other and they supported me. It was obviously very difficult for them but they decided to accept my decision because they understood the reasoning behind it and they couldn’t really defy it.

 There were some moments during those days in which I felt extremely alone. Of course, my determination didn’t really change because of that, on the contrary. But for some silly reason,  I thought that because of my decision, all those strange feelings would go away. I actually thought that fear would go away and just stop harassing me. But I guess fear is too strong of a feeling and there’s no real way of stopping it. After all, it’s the feeling that commands you to do so many things that you would otherwise never do. I found it all very interesting.

 When the day came, I was actually very calm about it. I ran my last errands, disconnected by phone and threw away my cellphone. Then, I drove my car to the most beautiful spot I knew, one that overlook the city and there I waited for the sun to go down. It was strange to me how not even birds interrupted my moment. It seemed that the universe had agreed that my decision was correct and that nothing should interrupt what I had decided to do. It was very beautiful, in way.

 I spent all night there, in the pitch-black night, hearing the sounds of the forest and of the city that was just below. During that time, I decided to reminisce about all the things that I had loved about myself and others. I could choose some of those memories rather easily, others were a little bit harder to find. But I spent all night thinking about them and about me and I think that was the perfect thing to do right then. Nothing would have been better, that’s what I feel at least.

 Then, just before the break of dawn, I pulled out a little bottle out of my jacket, opened it, and drank all of its content without hesitating for a second. The taste was very bitter at the start and very sweet at the end. I threw the bottle far way and then just laid down over the hood of my car, watching the last few stars of the night being chased by sunlight. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life and, probably, one of the last things I would ever see with my own two eyes.

 I think it took my body about ten more minutes to die after that. It was as if every single machine working inside me was shutting down. Every single factory inside, the stomach, the liver, the lungs, they were all turning off their machines, ending production for good. I didn’t get scared in the last moment; I didn’t feel remorse or anything like that. If anything, I thought that I had finally gotten what I needed. It had been my choice and it had been the right one, I knew it.

 I died fast. My body was found later that day. I asked for them, my family, to cremate my body and throw the ashes away somewhere nice. They did exactly that and I’m grateful to them even now. They were my rock all along, my reason to live.

 Some said afterwards that I was very young and that I had no right to die like I did, by choice. But I think they have only live their lives. So they don’t know what it’s like for other people, they forget life is more than just one thing. And one thing it isn’t, is fair.