The seller of lives

Come one, come all. There’s no cheating here, everything is out in the open. Our lives are not fake, but real, lives with a controlled designation of origin, lives made this way. Our lives have the blue seal of approval, guaranteed by the Belle Vite Regional Consortium. We don’t mess around here! We promise you an intense life, full of surprises, intense suffering, unexpected consequences, unhappy loves, losses, extreme cold and intense heat, illness, thirst, hunger, smelly emissions, pustules and sudden blindness. You will have to deal with a body that, as soon as you have learned to handle and guide it, will let you down for the slightest reason. You will come into contact with other bodies like yours that will do everything they can to hurt you, damage you, badmouth you and harm you in the most unexpected and subtle ways. You will lose all those closest to you. Those further away will do everything they can to kill you. They will force you to speak a language you do not understand. To live in the wrong bodies, the wrong sexes and wet T-shirts. We will inject you with massive doses of our powerful serum of blind will that will force you to grow up even though you don’t want to. We will push you to balance on two legs, and then to become adults, fill you with hair and pimples, and finally age you in a ruinous way, unable to articulate your limbs and mouth.

Something special will happen to you, something you will think is the most important thing in the world. You will fall in love with the vibration of a wave equation – whatever it is and whatever you think it is – which you will immediately lose and then believe you have seen again, and which you will chase in vain for the rest of your life. You will regret this equation and then forget it. You will be fascinated by sound waves and visual waves, Chinese shadows, stories told around the fire, enchanted by the words in stories and films that will unfold before your eyes, music in your ears. A sunset, a northern dawn. You will see things that you humans... At some point, you will want to scream, you will think you are crazy, that it is all a conspiracy. Don’t worry: at that very moment, you will meet a black tabby cat, soft and cuddly, your best and only friend, a ball of tenderness. It will hate you and wake you up every morning at 4 a.m. to ask for kibble that it will not eat.

On the other hand, everything you do, whatever it may be, will backfire on you. You won’t have time to savour slavery before you lose that too, without explanation and suddenly, just like that. You will understand little or nothing of everything you will suffer, either before or after. You will lose your mind, and it will be the best thing that ever happened to you, even if you will never know it, but first you will suffer from persistent tinnitus that will prevent you from sleeping at night, and you will no longer know which saint to pray to. You will be alone. You will no longer know your own name; you will forget it. But in the end... well, in the end - afterwards - we are not aware of anyone ever complaining about this thing called life that we sold you at a bargain price. Only $9.99, payable in convenient, easy, endless instalments. Welcome to the supermarket of life, come one, come all. Because, as we know, life can end quickly, but your soul will not be enough to pay for it.

Foto di form PxHere