Selected Cronicas

IF IT WERE ME

Whenever I mislay an important document and cannot find it, I ask myself: If it were me and I wanted to keep a document in a safe place, where would I put it? Sometimes this works. But at other times, I am so harassed by the phrase ‘If it were me’, that the search for that document becomes secondary and I begin to think. Or rather, to feel.

And I feel anything but reassured. Try it: if it were you, what would you do? From the outset one feels a certain inhibition: the lie into which we have settled has just been ever so slightly disturbed. Yet I have read biographies of certain people who suddenly started to be their true selves and completely transformed their lives. I think if I were to become truly me, my friends would stop greeting me on the street, for even my appearance would have changed. In what way? I cannot say.

I cannot reveal half the things I would do if it were left to me. I believe I might even end up in jail for certain crimes. And if it were left to me, I should give away everything that is mine and entrust the future to the future.

‘If it were me’ seems to sum up the greatest risk we face in life, a new entrée into the unknown. Yet I cannot help feeling that, after those first mad moments of euphoria, we would finally experience the world. We would certainly experience all the sorrow of this world. And our own sorrow too, that sorrow we have learned to ignore. But sometimes we would also be overcome by sheer ecstasy, by that utter happiness we can barely sense. Wait, I believe I am already experiencing it as I begin to smile and feel that sense of inhibition which comes when one is confronted by something momentous.