Collision

 

I haven’t told this to anyone, not even to my big brother who is still a virgin and lives off our parents. I haven’t told him because, you see, he’d say it was a coincidence, and coincidences are overrated, although useful – he says things like that cos he’s an intellectual, which means he has to walk around all gloomy and sceptical all the time. Me, I’m not very smart. Come to think of it, that’s really good, because it allows me to think and speak about all the impossible, irrelevant things that I find interesting, or funny in a way – I mean, who cares if it sounds stupid? Nevertheless, I did once try talking to my brother about collisions, but he didn’t understand, even when I told him that I know it was bound to happen once. He doesn’t believe in intuition, and anyway, collisions are things that are too personal, and too strange and inexplicable to be talked about, or doubted. Anyways, all I’m saying is, things collide sometimes, and one can never tell when it’s gonna happen, or whether it’s already happening, until it’s over. They’re dangerous, these crazy collisions, but sometimes they’re fun as well. And they do exist, although my big brother, who is still a virgin, and on top of it an intellectual, would think the opposite.

Anyway, I think my last one wasn’t a long time ago, but like I said, one can never tell. Come to think of it, I can’t remember more than one, but wouldn’t it be natural for humans to forget?

There was a street involved, and a red brick wall of an official building – when I say involved, I actually mean that we were both passing it, and at the same time, too. I don’t really remember how (you never do, when you collide), but we met; I guess it must have started with bumping into each other, then, while apologizing, he might have made a joke, a stupid joke, and then we probably laughed politely and said our names and shook hands – this sounds realistic.

On the other hand, I don’t remember his name.

My brother would find that appalling, after all that happened later on, but me, I don’t really care anymore – the collisions, they just run through your life, like a mistake, an anomaly in the normal course of events, and the best you can do is try not to think about them much after they happen, although they do leave you changed sometimes. The reason I’m telling this now, probably, is so I can finally get over it and start forgetting.

So we laughed and introduced each other, and right after that he suggested we have some coffee, and so we did, in such an easy-going, everyday manner that I should have known even then that something weird was gonna happen, only I didn’t  because one can never tell a collision while it’s still going on.  

The second clue that signalled a collision was the fact that we had so much in common: he agreed, enthusiastically, with everything I said, and the other way round, and everything I was going to say he knew already, and I would know that he knew, so I wouldn’t say it at all and we’d just smile to each other because we both understood.

When something as weird as having that kind of almost supernatural communication with a complete stranger starts happening, people usually become aware of it immediately. I mean, at least they should, I think. But, on the other hand, it seems that they only notice when it happens to someone else, because we all want a thing like that to happen, you know? Deep inside, we all want someone to run into us in the street and ask us out the same day and then to discover that we have, without making the least bit of effort, found our soul mate in that exact person; and when it happens – if it happens – we are so happy, so thrilled about it, that we are completely unable of realizing that it’s simply impossible.

That word, impossible, is a word my brother taught me, so I don’t like it very much and try to avoid it, but it’s not easy, given the number of things you can describe with it. Now, one of the nastiest things about impossible is that, when it starts happening, it isn’t really real so you get stuck in it, you do more and more impossible, unbelievable, outrageous things, and it spins totally out of control until you yourself are, in fact, impossible or, in different words, someone else.

By the time I was gazing in his eyes and seeing they were exactly like mine, I was already over there, in the insanely surreal, and I wasn’t really me (given the circumstances, it’s difficult to define me, but I try). Anyway, I know I stopped being me, the me who left the house that same morning,  cos that was the point when I stopped thinking about my brother, and I remember my last thought about him being that he’s twenty-four and still a virgin – poor little thing.

The thing about rivers is that, as one old, wise philosopher said once, you can’t step into the same one twice. Realities, I think (although don’t take my word for it cos I’m not the smart one in the family), are much like the rivers – once they part, they don’t gladly collide again. To some people, it seems, it never happens. Some, like me, notice that a little more often.

I wonder how long I can keep it up.

So there we were, walking across the bridge: note that we were walking, not taking a bus or a tram, we’re walking although the river is wide and ancient, we’re walking although the opposite bank is so far away you cannot see it from the other side. We walk across the river right to its very middle, cars and buses and trams are passing in clouds of smog and that odd, bluish mist you sometimes get in the evenings, and we are leaning onto the rail and looking down, where the water is.

The water is very deep, and cold. It moves lazily onward, steadily and confidently. The water knows where it is going, although, as that old, wise man, whose name I can never remember said, you can’t step into the same river twice. The same man, a dark man, spoke about strange fires, fires conflicting, eternal, colliding fires. I shudder.

“Do you know me?” he asks, all of a sudden, interrupting the song, the Portuguese sailing song, he was just singing.

“Of course”, I reply, although in the back of my head, suffocated by the mist, there is a though that tells me I’m being silly, of course I don’t know him, I met him two hours ago.

He looks steadily into my eyes and my final thought of resistance dies. In his eyes, I see myself; strangely, yet naturally, I could have easily been a boy. I could have been born in France, and Japan, and Africa, I could have been born at any time.

We collide as he embraces me tightly, lovingly, motherly, and once again, my reality breaks; for an instant, I am not born at all, and then I am all at once, I am him and I am myself, a boy and a girl, French and Japanese and alien, I am one and I am everything; everywhere, eternally.

The river passes; it never ceases to move. The river is the ever-changing constant, and its waves break us apart again, he moves away. His eyes are very clear, eerily so; mine, I don’t remember.

Mine could be anything now, up until the moment I look at myself in the mirror. The cars and the buses and the merry trams move past us as he takes me by the hand and leads me back to the same bank we came from. Then, he takes me by the hand (his, his hand is cold) and caringly takes me home. We do not speak, or at least I don’t remember much of it. Things fall back into their places and immediately start feeling unnatural to my vulnerable, freshly crushed self. We pass the same red brick wall where we met. The people in the streets seem a little different, a little more tangible. I press my body against his while we walk, hoping for the protection his embrace offered back in the bridge, and protection I get; I have never felt more safe in my entire life.

Pressed against him, who is all the possibilities my life could and will have been, I am complete, and I am at ease – it took me a long time to put it in words like that. Back then, I didn’t understand a thing.

Back then, it was merely a feeling of warmth. I was happy; the building I live in is the same as the other ten buildings around it, and yet, he found it with ease without me telling him the number.

Then I did a thing people usually do in normal situations, I smiled and asked if we could meet again, I like you, you seem like an interesting person, wouldn’t it be nice..? If felt wrong, of course, from the very moment I said it, but at that particular moment I guess there was no way to turn back time, so he had to move on with the seconds, he used one of them to frown a little and then he smiled again (I seem to remember him smile a lot, almost all the time). He promised to call; he happily squeezed my hand. I thanked him, awkwardly (and the awkwardness of it meant that it was over), for the pleasant afternoon, and looked at him, but we didn’t kiss although I desperately wanted to – this is probably the thing that saved me, eventually. Still, I regret it.

This is where we split.

*

I went inside my building, waved; he waved back, so I turned around and started to go up the staircase to the fourth floor, which is where I live. On the second floor the lights went out, so I spent some time looking for the switch, feeling uneasy because of the darkness, but even when the lights went back on again, the uneasiness stayed. Still, I moved on to the third floor, and with every step the feeling grew, became heavier and heavier to carry up the stairs; halfway to the fourth floor the feeling became fear, and by the time I got to the front door of my apartment, I was in an overwhelming, unexplainable panic.

 I ran downstairs, back to the street, very quickly and very loudly, the sounds of my feet reverberating in the cold silence of the hallways. He wasn’t there, of course, and although a collision was the first thing on my mind, I forced myself into thinking he must have gone home as soon as I went upstairs.hohow

*

The next thing I remember is running, pointlessly, and searching in all the places we’ve been to during the day, the red brick wall, the coffee shop, the river bank, the bridge, the door to my apartment opening into the darkness at three a.m. where my brother’s breathing is heard from the living room where the lights are off but I see him, and I see this girl, this beautiful young girl with huge sad eyes and all that hair. Her fingers are long, and he licks them hungrily, lasciviously, savouring them, he puts them in his mouth, he looks her in the eyes; her breasts he fondles gently, submissively, with his free hand.

I retire to my room, defeated, and soon enough, my twenty-four year old brother is no longer a virgin; I knew it was bound to happen, and it is unfortunate that, for him, it had to happen in that way. In the mirror, my eyes are shifting; I close them and look again – they’re green. They’re beautiful; different. My hair, too, has changed colour and just before I get to bed, my hands shaking softly and helplessly, I catch myself humming a song in Spanish, and it is summer, I live there, I live in Chile. I fall asleep. I will get used to it.

After all, Spanish is a lovely language.

The next morning my mother sets the table for three people: my father, me, and herself. I ask about my brother and she looks at me in this very odd way, she asks me whether I’m okay. I try entering my brother’s bedroom and I walk into a solid wall with a painting hung on the same spot where I remember the door to be.

I’ll miss him, I guess, although maybe I’ll meet him again somewhere, or he’ll return. At least, I console myself trying not to cry because crying would arouse suspicion and I would surely be proclaimed clinically insane.

At least he is not a virgin anymore.

I smile. He doubted it so much, and yet, he didn’t even need a river.

*

The next thing I remember is running, pointlessly, and searching in all the places we’ve been to during the day, the red brick wall, the coffee shop, the river bank, the bridge, my mother waiting for me at the door at three a.m. pale and worried and my brother, my brother not paying attention at all to my late arrival, as he was in the kitchen, playing cards and drinking whiskey with a lesbian friend of his for whom he’s always secretly had the hots. She turned around (her name is Sarah, and I can totally understand my brother’s crush on her: she’s so beautiful, with the huge sad eyes and all that hair) and smiled at me absently, tiredly, and said hello in her quiet voice, exactly like she always does when I come in; I guess that was when I’d finally realized that everything around me was real again, the dim light, the knave of spades in my brother’s hand, the traffic noise outside.

Now that it was over, I have, of course, realized that it was that thing, that weird coincidence my brother says is impossible and I it colliding with one’s self. It’s not that I regret it happening, because, as I said, it is equally dangerous and fun, and this one, it made me happy, at least for a while, and unlike my brother, I like being happy. Maybe because of that I somehow seek collisions, in a way I am not aware of, and I find them, and see them, and lose them and time, reality and people start over again. And, when all is said and done, I don’t mind them too much, the anomalies. 

The problem is, sometimes you get stuck in it, you go just a little bit crazier than you used to be, which doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, because everybody has to be at least a little bit crazy in order to be sane, I guess, but still, it’s a little bit annoying when it starts happening more and more often and you don’t even know whether it’s different or it’s just the same thing happening again or a memory or a déjà vu. So all I’m saying is, you lose an awful lot of time, and you lose yourself, bit by bit and number by number, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s much of me left, though my big brother, to whom I always talk to when I’m unsure about something, believes that it is possible that the human mind and spirit are endless. I, however, am not an intellectual and don’t feel like I can contemplate on the subject, not really, so I just listen to what he says, and sometimes I even agree with him. I usually talk to him about the things that confuse me, and it helps. I once tried talking to him about collisions, but he didn’t understand, even when I told him that I know it was bound to happen once. He doesn’t believe in intuition, and anyway, collisions are things that are too personal, and too strange and inexplicable to be talked about, or doubted. This is why I haven’t told this to anyone, not even to my big brother who is still a virgin and lives off our parents. He’d say coincidences are overrated, although useful – he says things like that cos he’s an intellectual, which means he has to walk around all gloomy and sceptical. Me, I’m not very smart. Come to think of it...