Birth of a Mother E-Book

Simone Malacrida

• Herausgeber: Simone Malacrida
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The eternal cycle of Life, made up of births and rebirths, is the protagonist of a series of circular stories, completely detached from a precise spatial and temporal location.
Suspended between being unique or connected to other people, the different dialectics, allegorically represented by as many female figures, bring out the evidence of being and becoming, in an endless dance that involves every single person.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Birth of a Mother

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VIII

IX

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XI

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XXI

SIMONE MALACRIDA

“ Birth of a Mother”

Simone Malacrida (1977)

Engineer and writer, has worked on research, finance, energy policy and industrial plants.

ANALYTICAL INDEX

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I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

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The main characters of the book are the product of the author's pure imagination and do not correspond to real individuals, just as their actions did not actually happen. Any resemblance to people or things is purely coincidental.

The eternal cycle of Life, made up of births and rebirths, is the protagonist of a series of circular stories, completely detached from a precise spatial and temporal location.

Suspended between being unique or connected to other people, the different dialectics, allegorically represented by as many female figures, bring out the evidence of being and becoming, in an endless dance that involves every single person.

“Birth is never as certain as death. And that is why being born is not enough. It is to be reborn that we are born.”

Pablo Neruda

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​I

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“He who wishes to enter the divine kingdom must first enter the body of his mother, and die there.”

Paracelsus

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Now that I am almost at the end of my existence, I can turn to the past and think that I will find comfort there.

It's not like it used to be, when what was behind me was simply gone and was less than what I had ahead.

Am I satisfied with what I've achieved?

Yes, although I know it could have been better.

Everything can be done better, it depends on our degree of acceptance of imperfection.

We are not perfect and this needs to be understood as early as possible, usually right after adolescence.

I have lost important figures, such as my parents and most of my relatives and friends, but I have gained others.

My daughter Beatrice, for example.

And, later, his two daughters, Cecilia and Anna.

Presences that have brightened my life and made it light.

I know that there was a clear break in me when Beatrice was born.

It was not marriage or love that changed me, but that little creature that came out of my womb.

A naked and defenseless frog, this is the first image.

“You’ve become a mother...”, my mother had told me, somehow seeing herself in me.

Now I understand what he meant.

It was the same feeling I had when Beatrice gave birth.

Different times with different customs and different traditions, but ultimately everything is always the same in the repetition of the world.

I close my eyes and I'm still there.

To those unforgettable moments and those moments of union between pain and joy.

The very essence of life.

*******

“Come on Anna, don’t give up. We’re almost at the end.

The worst is over.”

The midwife was encouraging one of the many mothers giving birth for the first time.

It wasn't easy, he knew.

She had experienced it in the past too.

The rhythm of life is marked by pangs and syncopated breathing.

It all seems so natural, but it doesn't seem so.

Anna felt her hand being squeezed.

He needed a hold, something to hold on to.

Could the pain get any more intense?

Yes, that's what everyone had told her.

It was crazy.

It must have been worth it.

He stared at a fixed point on the ceiling.

White or rather whitish.

The pure, ideal white that painters and artists so vaunt does not exist.

There are multifarious varieties of colors, all mixed together and all perceivable by the human eye, a near-perfect machine for visible light, a tiny crack in an electromagnetic spectrum that has remained obscure and unknowable for millennia.

He could have stayed there and probed that point.

Penetrate it deeply and alienate yourself.

It was a good way to not remember anything about the pain, since the doctors had no natural or artificial remedy.

Despite this, he preferred to wake up.

He had to be present and aware, at his peak.

She became a mother in all respects.

He would never forget it.

The beginning of the journey and the end of a certain phase.

Successive stages in the evolution of life, identical to the past or to how we are used to conceiving it.

“Now take a deep breath and push.”

Anna did so.

He knew it was all for his own good, but his brain worked differently.

He was feeling pain and was triggering chemical reactions on every level.

Defense, mainly.

An endless torment.

He said he had to put an end to all this.

Five more pushes.

He did them and nothing happens.

Five more.

Just to complete the decalogue he had in his head.

She felt something move and break free, a commotion around her and a kind of euphoria.

Suddenly, emptiness.

It had happened.

Tears and sweat, then a cry.

Creaking of a human being, delicate and defenseless.

Was everything done for this moment?

It seemed so.

A new meaning for a new path.

“We will call her Beatrice,” that was what had been decided and that was what he had told everyone.

*******

Anna walked nervously in a place unfamiliar and unfamiliar to her.

It was the first time he had come across all this.

Mostly strangers' faces, with some familiar ones.

Her husband and her son-in-law.

His in-laws' family.

A few acquaintances, but very few to tell the truth.

All gathered for one simple and unique purpose.

Staying close to Beatrice in the happiest moment ever.

Only Anna could understand and maybe her mother-in-law.

They were women who had passed through the same door and undergone the same exact trials.

Years ago, now almost forgotten under the blanket of heavy memories and great hopes.

But now, with the hunger and the waiting, everything became more vivid.

It was a slow resurfacing.

Smells and sounds, first of all.

It seemed as if they had been blinded, prey to the climactic event, but all this was just a kind of excuse.

They remembered it very well.

The feeling of alienation and the whole world spinning, as if they were drunk or on a ship in the throes of a storm.

Alien sounds.

Psychedelic lights.

Brain with synapses in a tailspin.

There was a kind of realistic and partly cynical awareness.

“There’s no point in pining,” her husband told her.

Anna smiled.

Poor deluded male who doesn't know what it means.

She would have liked to answer him harshly:

“What do you know about it?

Pain and insight are ours alone.”

There was silence.

It was better.

It would not have been understood and, perhaps, it would have had the opposite effect.

The only alternative was the wearing of shoes and the rubbing of hands.

Limbs that moved without any sense and without responding to any logic of survival, as if they were possessed by third parties with completely independent wills.

The woman's thoughts went to what was behind the door.

Scenes that have been identical for millennia, with the same destiny of joy and pain, sometimes even death.

To endure all that and then watch someone dying be born or perish yourself was the height of mockery.

At the very moment of Life's greatest triumph, there was even room for Death.

A dilemma from which there was no escape.

The Sun gave way to darkness or darkness to light, no difference in time, except the awareness that flowed.

With or without our consent.

Finally, the end of everything.

The final outcome on which everything would depend.

It was Cecilia.

A new woman who would also enter the great wheel of generation.

Wanted or not, sought or not.

Desired, perhaps.

It was not known in that context, but at least there had been a further step.

To where?

Nobody knew, only Anna was wondering.

*******

Anna was called by a familiar sound.

It was the voice of his daughter, who had just started speaking.

He was already walking and moving independently, now the first rudiments of language.

She was a lively and precocious child, who was interested in the world.

“What's up Beatrice?”

The little girl stared at her, puzzled.

She didn't have any particular requests, she just wanted to make her bright timbre heard.

Anna picked her up.

She still weighed very little and liked to be rocked or thrown around with somersaults.

He smiled and showed off his little teeth.

Had she been like that too?

Yes, it could have been.

Only he didn't remember it, just like none of us remember it.

It is human nature to forget, especially the early years, the most carefree ones but also the harbingers of grave dangers.

Illnesses and pains that are expressed with many cries and tears, something that leaves a deep and indelible mark on us.

Anna stared at Beatrice.

He had his features, the ones he had always known and the ones he glimpsed in the mirror every morning.

For the little girl, however, her mother's face was unmistakable and belonged to only one person in the world.

The most important one.

The one who gave her security and reliability.

She who was always there, on every occasion and who absorbed every little change and variation.

“Shall we put on a new dress?”

The little girl burst into a hug and began to swing her little legs.

She wanted to be put on the ground to walk.

A present that would soon become the past, even though everyone thought they were facing an eternal and never-ending future.

Transient illusion of the world.

*******

Cecilia was happy to see her grandmother.

It happened often, but the little girl could never get enough of it.

There was a kind of bond that transcended age between the two of them.

Something that could not be explained and that only the mystery of existence would unravel.

“Grandma Anna...”

She ran into his arms, once powerful and now almost flaccid.

Elasticity and tone were memories of the past, now lost forever.

Even Anna's hair, a source of pride for decades, had darkened and turned grayish.

We had to accept it.

"Come here."

Cecilia let herself be hugged and cuddled.

That was what he had been looking for.

"Bread..."

He had simple tastes, easy to satisfy.

No fancy foods and no other variations.

Anna saw herself as a child again, as never before.

New and, in part, dormant sensations.

Just another way of claiming to have existed, somewhere, at some time.

Abstract entities that passed through her head.

What was in her?

A great broken dream, a dashed hope, a tangible sign of the flow of intentions.

He sat down.

She was tired, like she had never been before.

She, who never remained still and was known for enduring all kinds of hardship, had to rest.

He would never have said it, but life has these unexpected surprises in store for us.

What else could have been said about the future?

That was unknowable, while we would like to forget about the past.

Not always, but sometimes.

Being unique and unrepeatable has a price, that of transience.

“Shall we go out in the sun?”

Cecilia agreed.

It was amazing to dive into the meadows full of grass and flowers, in the middle of Nature and feel everything flowing inside you like in an eternal dance.

The flow of moments and life.

*******

It had been a natural decision.

Just another way to come to an agreement and satisfy a deep desire that they had been nurturing for a long time.

Anna and her husband had decided to have children, to start a family.

It was not something that could be planned in depth, since chance had inscrutable ways of acting.

How many people tried and failed?

How many people didn't want it and it happened?

Many, too many, so many.

And no one was asked for consent.

“What will our life be like?

Will anything change?”

If they had said no, they would have lied, but also if they had said the opposite.

The reality was that they didn't know and no advice from others could have directed them.

It was their decision and the final judgment awaited only the two of them.

Anna felt like the guardian of the truth, since everything would have to pass through her body.

Somehow, stressed and stretched beyond belief, without any respect, but still part of the normal natural cycle.

One could disagree, but what would have changed?

Nothing.

The Universe has been doing this since time immemorial and would continue to do so.

By now the die was cast and all boundaries had been crossed.

They didn't notice it right away, but only after a couple of months.

There is no precise moment when one begins to be a parent and Anna herself could never have said when her vocation as a mother began.

Before or after getting pregnant?

Before or after giving birth?

Was she already born a mother?

Maybe, but he wouldn't have bet on it.

*******

Of all that had happened in her life, what could Anna say?

Perhaps a third party would have better expressed his thoughts.

Entrusting your ideas to others is a way of detaching yourself and seeing everything with different eyes.

Parallel and convergent visions.

The point was to choose who was the chosen one, or rather the chosen one given the completely feminine matrix of her existence.

Someone not too far away but not too close.

Not a daughter, not a granddaughter, not a relative.

Not even a friend or an acquaintance.

Anna felt an abstract entity pervade her body and mind and carry her away in ecstasy to other dimensions.

Transported to a place where no physical law or deterministic explanation would have held true.

Cause and effect relationships reversed, bonds broken and reconnected in a random and fluctuating way.

Furthermore, there was no certainty in being or existing.

Everything was becoming and changing in shape, color, smell and every other intrinsic and extrinsic characteristic.

"Who are you?"

The ever-present question.

Know.

This is what unites us.

Desire and temerity.

Anna found herself without any filter in front of this entity and her past opened up before her.

He could access every moment of her existence simply with a glance.

Places and times had been lost in the darkness, without any logic anymore.

There she is, infant and old.

Happy and sad.

Under the sun or exposed to the fury of the rain.

He found himself speaking in other languages and was amazed.

How was this possible?

“Is it really me?

Isn’t this a dream?”

Who could have sworn that?

Nobody.

He closed his eyes and began to sleep.

*******

I feel at peace.

It's a strange and quite novel feeling.

For years, I fought, in fact I was characterized that way.

“You never give up.”

“You have an enviable vitality.”

Recurring phrases towards me.

Even in adulthood and old age, as if nothing had happened and as if my face had not wrinkled.

It seems like everything has stopped.

In a time frozen by events and crystallized by the desire not to change.

Beatrice is far away, at least to my tired limbs.

The same goes for my nieces, who lead independent lives and are also about to become mothers.

An eternal wheel that never stops turning and that sees everyone involved in a single great current.

Space surrounds me and makes me unaware.

It intoxicates me.

I feel my faculties letting go.

Is it death?

Maybe, but I wouldn't swear to it.

It's too sweet to be.

Maybe it's life itself that flows.

Anna is this, all included.

Being a woman, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, niece, aunt, cousin and any other relationship of kinship or friendship.

There is not just one Anna.

There are simulacra and projections, shadows and imprints.

I lived, that's all.

Happy?

Yes, I can conclude this way.

And my testimony is only one.

Seer of visions that loom on the horizon like a being without time and without logic.

Laugh at the world.

This is my ultimate challenge.

“Anna, when are you coming back?”

“Anna, where are you going?”

“Anna, what do you think?”

My name echoed everywhere and without any barrier.

Being suspended between nothingness and the stars waiting for a definitive signal.

The past is gone, without regrets and with recriminations.

Filed in my heart as a young man.

Anna is now just a big name that encompasses my whole life, from the first moment to the moment before this thought.

“Is it still you?”

Yes, like never before.

It is my way of fixing the fate of the world, in total freedom and without any more futile and banal ties.

I have freed myself from the bonds and have no further qualms about preserving the memory.

It is in me, without limits.

*******

Silent river between your fingers, like golden sand,

every moment, a present breath.

Memories dance in a starry sky,

fragments of life, lost moments,

that intertwine in infinite colors.

Birth dresses itself, guardian of dreams,

but it slips away, like water through fists.

Time is a teacher, not a single dawn,

an endless cycle, an eternal memory.

*******

Electra

Thales

Lead

Megrez

Vishuddha

Anya

Sahasrara

​II

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“The earth is a beautiful place and worth fighting for.”

Ernest Hemingway

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I don't have much ahead of me.

The future unfolds unknown and, for the most part, does not fully belong to me, since I will only be able to share a few moments and fragments of it.

This is something whose interest is waning.

Yes, I have visions.

Favorite scenarios.

Some symbols that all humanity has carried within itself since the dawn of time.

A general sharing of progress, combined with a concern for a world that has disappeared and whose balances have disintegrated.

Everyone has had this paradigm shift and a similar disharmony towards social changes.

It's not like when we were young.

Everyone experiences it.

In my heart, as a woman, wife, daughter, granddaughter, mother and grandmother, I have begun to translate this concept to those around me.

The future belongs to them.

How they want to be and how they want to set up their existence.

So what is my job?

Perhaps to indicate a path, not even to trace it.

Whoever creates it is an explorer and a discoverer, but that does not belong to me.

I am the arrow, rather.

A way to remember how one should be.

I can afford it given the age I have reached and the notches I have placed within the human experience index.

Living is not enough, it is not a sufficient condition.

Necessary yes, but to be an indicator something else is needed.

Reflection and processing.

Finally, the advice.

Nothing, however, can happen without a minimum amount of empathic impulse.

This is what sets us apart and elevates us in the evolutionary consideration of those around us.

I have dispensed all this to a few intimates, not to all of humanity.

I don't feel like a leader or a people leader.

Small contiguous units, that's all.

*******

Anna pulled herself together.

When he found himself playing with his granddaughters, he lost all sense of proportion and age.

She projected herself as a child again, with the same amazement of the past transmuted in her eyes.

In front of her were Cecilia, now nine years old, and Anna, her four-year-old younger sister, the one who bore the same name as her grandmother.

She had always felt special because of this, without understanding how that name was so widespread.

Everyone is, in their own way.

They follow fashions through time and space, but ultimately repeat themselves identically throughout the evolution of humanity.

“Grandma, aren’t you coming with us?”

Cecilia was always the driving force behind every game.

As the eldest, she felt responsible for her little sister but this also made her aware of being a role model.

“Wait, little one.

You have to give me time to catch my breath.”

Compared to a few years earlier, it was increasingly difficult to keep up with the girls' rhythms.

The heart would race as it pleased and the head would sometimes start to spin around on its own, without any kind of motivation or command.

The youngest granddaughter sat down and stared at her grandmother.

In his wrinkled, blemished face, his white hair and sagging skin she found a sense of family and security.

Inside his mind there were thoughts that were not yet well formed and, therefore, more spontaneous.

No human artifice had been able to encrust them with the patina of hypocrisy of good, right-thinking society.

There would come a time when all this would end, but perhaps Anna, the grandmother, would never see it.

For now he limited himself to spending time with them, in the absence or presence of his parents.

A parallel and wavering relationship, made of antitheses and commonalities.

The time of enchantment, which usually lasts longer than the seven years of apprenticeship.

*******

Alone in her room, Anna wondered where she was.

There were foreign objects next to her.

Things that didn't belong to her and spaces she didn't recognize.

Was he perhaps going crazy?

No, she was sure of it.

So where was he located?

“Mom, are you still standing there?”

His daughter Beatrice revealed herself.

In front of the old lady was a kind of ghost.

It was as if Anna had stood in front of the mirror and the image that came back was that of herself, but as an adult, not yet old.

A leap back in time.

This had shocked her.

Was it that easy to trick the mind?

Of the reflected simulacra, that was enough.

“Come on, hurry up, we’re going to be late.”

Anna didn't understand.

Late for where?

Where would they go and to whom?

Did they have an appointment?

They were all spontaneous questions that rose from below to her brain, but which were then not uttered.

They just echoed in his head and remained there without being brought to the attention of others.

In this way, one was judged to be strange or perhaps senile, Anna knew it but she couldn't do anything about it.

It was a natural inhibition that was in her, something innate and that comes into play as a defense mechanism.

To avoid being reprimanded, we kept quiet.

Because, Beatrice, in her perfect dialectic and logic, would certainly have remembered that she had already said everything.

Several times.

Anna moved, first with one step and then with the next.

Outside, he saw his two granddaughters.

Teenagers.

She was already in love, you could see it in her eyes.

Cecilia had probably found a boy with whom she could share her first youthful passions.

She was tall, taller than them.

He towered over his mother and grandmother and could square them up in a dominant position.

Anna, the youngest, was still in the early adolescence phase, where the turmoil is greater than the passions and joys.

Difficult times, but to be accepted.

They all set off.

For Grandma Anna, the route was unknown as was the final destination, but she pretended to understand.

To be like other women.

Self-confident and without doubts towards the outside world.

*******

Anna had always liked ceremonies.

The pomposity and the polish, the guests and the gifts, the rituals and procedures.

In each of them there was a script to follow.

Everyone got into their role and part, as if it were a theatrical fiction.

No one was himself at that moment, but became a mask.

He wore one, but not only that.

It became the same substance as the mask.

Everyone was the mask.

And Anna had always loved to wear several of them, so as not to reveal her soul and her true nature.

Masks protect us, but they can also cause us to deviate from our path and take our lives.

This could not happen during the ceremonies, as they all ended with the concluding rites.

For a ceremony to be such and to be exalted, several phases were needed, all perfectly interlocked.

The preparation of the ceremony was something delegated to a few.

To an officiant and the organizers, usually the main protagonists and some sidekicks they leaned on.

All this was needed for the second phase which is given by waiting.

Of all the steps, the wait was by far the most important as every single extra would be practicing to get into character.

What was needed was a stage costume and a script.

Makeup and affectation.

Everyone, individually or in small groups, prepared themselves and, at the same time, the anticipation grew.

At that point, the ceremony, having reached the height of tension, could begin.

A prologue, necessary to ease tensions, and then the subsequent acts in which everyone had to have a role.

The officiant stood out in the central hub of the ceremony, the main protagonists at the beginning and at the end, while the entire body of extras and the theatre company acted as a glue and as a filler of interludes.

So when the ceremony was over, everyone took home a little piece of satisfaction.

Having played a role and witnessed a show.

The ceremony that day was Cecilia's wedding.

The first granddaughter, although not Anna's favorite, was about to begin a journey that both her mother and grandmother had already undertaken.

And, like them, all this was shared with previous generations, absent for obvious reasons on that day, but present in spirit.

Anna herself was considered the connecting line between the past and the future.

The matriarch, the only one of that generation still alive, became the guardian of tradition.

“What was it like in your day?”

“Do you remember the first ceremony?”

How could you forget it?

Anna had attended a funeral.

His grandmother's.

He must have been five years old, he didn't remember well.

From that moment on, she understood how much she liked performances, whether they were comedies or tragedies.

She had become accustomed to that world and could have written the script and the lines in advance.

All obvious and predictable.

Everything, in reality, has already happened.

*******

Although she was younger than her sister, Anna, granddaughter of her grandmother of the same name, had been the first to give birth.

His daughter was now already one year old.

Just as he had done a century earlier, he was trying to learn the rudiments of language and upright posture.

Evolution, yes, but on a time scale of more than a thousand years.

If we were to observe what happens to children, we would not be able to discern much between today and the distant past and even the distant future, no matter how much pervasive technology may be changing habits and possibilities.

Would the grandmother, now great-grandmother, have witnessed all this?

There was no way to know.

It was a twist of fate and everything was in the hands of this ineluctable Fate that not even the Gods can oppose.

More and more relegated to the corner of memories, with faculties increasingly less present, Anna would have wondered what had happened to her life.

A flutter of wings and eyelashes.

Closing her eyes, she could still see herself as a child in the room created inside her father's house.

When she reopened them, she was already a great-grandmother.

How much time had passed?

It depended on the observer.

For the external one, coinciding with the rest of humanity, the almost century with which it had coexisted.

But to his inner demon, all of this was but a moment.

And everything would have become confused in a continuous whirlwind.

Past and future, cause and effect, action and reaction, logic and irrationality.

There was something unknown in this mechanism.

A single hand governing everything was possible, but not very credible due to the extreme complexity.

Could all this be conceived within a single superior entity?

Perhaps.

There were no certainties.

Beliefs yes.

*******

Returned to the state of dust, atoms scattered in the eternal darkness, Anan would have blended in with the rest of the Cosmos.

"It's you?

Is that you?

Where?"

Senseless questions.

What would have survived?

The thought?

If we were able to define it, measure it, and know the mechanisms of its formation, then we could say yes, but all of this is unknown.

Not only for the current state of knowledge, but even for all the future that remained to Anna and for how much her elements had wandered among the various natural constituents.

It was not given to know.

That's all.

Without testimony and without any form of proof, scientific or empirical, philosophical or theological.

So what is the point of projecting our aspirations and hopes into an undefined elsewhere?

To nothing, maybe just to find excuses.

Anna wouldn't have allowed it.

Determined, once and for all, to defeat not so much death as the reign of oblivion, she would install drops of herself inside others, so as to remain alive for at least another two generations.

And then he would have made his descendants understand how to do the same, so as to perpetuate an infinite mechanism of eternal remembrance of the identical.

I do not return, since no one is transformed into the same matter or the same idea, but I remember.

This is what remains for us humans at the end of the entire journey, the perilous cosmic transoceanic journey within which the events of our lives unfold.

It was a daunting task, one that no one had ever accomplished before, but one that Anna felt she had to try.

It was his challenge.

“For us two, treacherous weather.”

Angry gesture, penetrating gaze, excruciating pain.

*******

Rewinding the tape of what had not yet happened, there were, before Anna, myriads of possible choices.

Each of them led to a different path, made up of other labyrinths of doors and interconnections.

The paradox was that, despite different paths, sometimes there were common features or, despite everything being different, we reached the same destination.

All given by the irrationality of complexity.

All phenomena surrounding man and the environment are complex in themselves, based on non-linear effects with positive and negative feedback loops in which causes and effects sometimes merge and influence each other, breaking down any concept of mechanism and direct proportionality between cause and effect.

Small causes can give rise to large, uncontrollable and potentially devastating effects; minimal variations in the initial conditions or certain parameters can lead to completely different evolutions of the system, nullifying any previously adopted prediction.

The presence of feedbacks can cause certain variables to grow indefinitely or to disappear and this phenomenon, if not properly foreseen, can lead to a destabilization of the entire system up to a possible collapse.

Each single consequence just mentioned completely destroys the idea, as reassuring as it is false, of being able to govern complex systems by acting independently on the individual known parameters. If we did so, we could end up provoking reactions and effects that are completely different from those hoped for, even in the opposite direction to what was initially foreseen.

The intrinsic complexity certainly entails a certain disappointment, a certain lack of confidence in our means to be able to intervene effectively in such an intertwined and multifaceted issue and a certain diminution of our myths of omnipotence and omniscience regarding our ability to predict the outcomes of our interventions.

How to live with such certainty?

How can we make the need for action coexist with all that is complex?

Anna had no real, rational, scientific, experimentally proven answer.

Just an internal feeling, something completely irrational and not understandable as a method to use for what instead seemed so well defined.

The feeling of existing and being able to change the course of events with your choices.

So he would live, the same way he had done up until that moment.

Staring at the ceiling of the room, he said to himself without hesitation.

“My end is my beginning.”

Great truth that is never fully understood.

*******

Around the table at home, all the women of the family sat.

Grandma Anna, Beatrice, Cecilia and her sister Anna.

They all stared at a central, focal point where a magic mirror was placed.

It was a piece of reflective glass that distorted the reflected images so as to deflect the rays and transmit the profile of someone else sitting at exactly the right angle.

It was enough to orient the mirror to obtain a different solution.

So each could become the other and vice versa.

What did all this mean?

It was a game that grandmother Anna had brought, restored by who knows who and passed from hand to hand.

No one knew the real owner of this game and who invented it.

Nevertheless, it had one fundamental property.

It captured the attention and brain of those who looked at it, bringing them to a state of momentary tranche.

Freed from the physical bond, each could truly become the other, not just through a game of external features.