distancing myself
Marcelo Medone
I wake up peacefully at the first light of the morning. The memories of my recent dream fade even though I want to apprehend them. I get out of bed and gradually regain my consciousness. The mirror reveals an old, haggard and unshaven man. I smile, despite everything.
I dismiss the idea of having my coffee and go barefoot into the garden, barely dressed in my cotton robe.
The cool dew soaking the grass makes me shiver in elation; an electric tingle runs through my nerves from my toes to finally lodge in my brain and light it up like a Christmas tree, glowing in white and red tides.
I stand on tiptoes and dance like a tireless top, extending my thin arms to give me momentum. The world revolves around me, like a slow-motion movie. In turn, the world beholds a gray and insane old man spinning in the middle of his garden.
I take off my robe and my nudity connects me without intermediaries with my surroundings, submerging me in an orgasm of cosmic communion. A sensory oversaturation invades me hopelessly.
I tremble with cold and excitement, I faint, I wake up, I gasp for air, I convulse and I shiver. My skin frees itself from my skeleton in a painless skinning and goes gently with the breeze that blows from the sea, rising like a pale and undulating sheet that is lost from sight without remorse.
Without haste, I continue my way to the cliff that overlooks the sea, following the beacon of the sun on the horizon, fleeing from my own shadow, walking against the wind that sneaks between my exposed anatomical recesses.
I reach the cliff and inflate my lethargic lungs with the humid and salty air, my feet on the edge of the cliff, my long gray hair flapping like a thousand sterile snakes, my blood pulsating beat by beat in my ears, my lips murmuring in ethereal words an ancestral mantra in a language I do not know, my eyes with exhausted eyelids open wide contemplating the wonder of the universe condensed in that golden solar disc, a renewed Aleph imagined by the immortal Borges, the immensity summed up in the singularity, the sum of everything focused on a single joyful epiphany.
Like in a dream, I shed my bones, my tendons, my muscles and my most intimate organs and float above the waves, away from everything, away from me.
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a fiction writer, poet, essayist and screenwriter. He received numerous awards and was published in more than 40 countries, including the US. He was awarded the First Prize in the 2021 international contest by the American Academy of the Spanish Language with his surreal short story “La súbita impuntualidad del hombre del saco a rayas llamado Waldemar” (“The Sudden Unpunctuality of the Man in the Striped Jacket Named Waldemar”). His flash fiction story “Last Train to Nowhere Town” was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. Facebook: Marcelo Medone / Instagram: @marcelomedone