Hitchhiking to the Moon

So, I’m hitchhiking to the moon, or at least that’s what I say to those who pick me up from the road sides. So, lastly, I have been picking a lot of rides, all of them, I may say, more or less in tune with the forces and wills of the universe and as I usually accept what the universe has to offer me, where my drivers want to take me, I go. And so, because of that, I have no idea where I’m now, but, who cares? In the beginning, when I started hitchhiking, I was caught by some silent people, people that didn't want to know who am I or where I’m or I was going, and for a while that was ok for me. But then, I was picked by people interested in my destiny, drivers interested in this personage of mine, so, in order to mislead, in order to fulfill their curiosity, I had to create some biographical data, scattered things, etc. I didn't always tell the same story, and because I speak several languages, plus some other invented ones, I could pass as Caucasian, as Beltran, as Sicran or whatsoever. Therefore sometimes I said to be the fruit of an incest between the moon and the sun, or that I had come from the Caribbean in a ship made of tin, or that I was just arriving from the World War III, or that I’m escaping from the evil yet looking for work in the fields, willing to work with the red fruits, or climbing lampposts. Or perhaps a mere lawless tourist making his way through the new world. And I remember, one of the first rides, a long time ago, was with a mature lady, hairspray overflowing, the car’s interior totally decorated with various types of teddies, dogs without eyes, colorful monkeys with bells around the neck, pink cats, etc... The auto-radio reverberating songs with caressing rhythms and light-romantic melodies. And so, along the way she was confessing details about her messy but happy life and so, I got to know that her paternal great-grandfather was from Russian origin and had made a fortune working as a goldsmith. She went on even explaining that his maternal great-grandmother belonged to the royal family, but had been completely excommunicated because of adultery. About the grandmother and grandfather the woman did not speak. About her father, she said that, all his life he has been a cobbler, a cobbler that died with complications in the heart, and her mother, a seamstress, now admitted to a nursing home, counting buttons… and then, on the next ride, I was picked up by a young man in a sporty car. The young man said to be a pharmacist and I asked him which was the best selling drug in his pharmacy, and he said “It is the Aspirin, for sure, and the balm for insect bites, also”, which was funny to acknowledge. And so he took me to some village with almost no people, some sleepwalkers, and a lot of empty buildings. Then I was taken in a van full of chips, chips being distributed from caffe house to caffe house, and the driver was an effeminate man who claimed to be the incarnation of kali, and regarded himself as the ultimate manifestation of Shakti, the primordial cosmic energy, and the mother of all living beings. And then I was taken by a young woman, an economics student. She told me that her father worked unloading pits. And I also got a ride with a couple highway workers, they took me to their office and showed me their treasures, all the little things they had been finding in the road ditches over the years. We shared alms. Then I got a ride with a couple on their honeymoon, they took me to the beach, and they used me as their photographer. And I got a ride with a small group of drug dealers, they made me try new things. And I also got a ride with a crazy truck driver that placed a bible in my lap while pressing the barrel of a gun against my temple, he forced me to read certain parts from the big book at his command, but, it turned out that the gun was fake, just a prop gun, that thing they use in the movies. This just to say some, some of the rides I had taken until now, the ones that stood out the most. Thus, now I’m a-board a posh vehicle accompanied by an exiled contemporary-history teacher, we have been talking about different concepts, embracing the profound, the superficial and the superfluous and at some point he advances with a confuse speech about fashion and security that goes more and less like this: "When the future is threatening and uncertain... and there is the only retraction... a retraction of the present that is constantly being protected, arranged and recycled in an endless youth... and while putting the future in parentheses, the system proceeds... the devaluation of the past... impatient for cutting off the chains of territorialities and archaic traditions... impatience for instituting a society without a base of anchorage and opacity... this together with an indifference to the historical time… a collective narcissism is established... so, a clear symptom of the generalized crisis of the bourgeois societies of today” and while he says those things, me, looking around the upholstery of this car, commenting “But aren’t you a bourgeois as well?” and he, without looking at me, continues. "Since the jeans… the fashion has not stopped to promote the original clothing of the working class… the army and sports... like… bib pants... napkins... parkas and the sailor jacket, the jogging style... peasant skirts... the frivolous identifying with the serious and the functional... and in doing so adopting an explicit parody style... so, when imitating utilitarian clothes, fashion maladjust its points of reference... the solemnity dissipates and the forms lose what they could have of lustrous or studied… Thus, fashion and its exterior ceased to be radically opposed... this in parallel with the trend, everywhere visible, of opposition's refusal... fashion today belongs to the sloppy, to the relaxed... the new must seem used and the studied must look spontaneous... and the most sophisticated fashion nowadays imitates and parodies the natural..." And as our interlocutor says those things, I sleep and actually, I’m already inside this recurrent dream of mine, with the sky falling over the desert, and my queen of none, one hand holding the lining of her wedding dress, running along the white corridors of the psychiatric hospital, that I also recognize, going up and down a staircase with flashing lights, and then going through some white corridors with white doors on both side… now she tries to open some of these doors, sticks just the head inside, and screams some interjections, slamming door after door, dragging her ragged and rumpled wedding dress along these corridors... So, another door, she gently turns the knob and walk in on her toes. Inside the light is dim and flickers, and there is a soft candle-lamp installed in the middle of two unmade beds, and while turning around, we can see a body in a corner, a shrunken body in fetal position, shaking and making a humming sound... but she don't turn to it, she rather approaches the unmade beds, smells the sheets and then, while looking under the bed, she whispers some words like "I've arrived, my love, I've come to pick you up… our vessel is ready, let's go now"; and "Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiu!” says a mouth under the bed. And so, there she goes again running through another corridor, turning right, turning left, climbing another flight of stairs, getting into another corridor and entering another room, and once inside, it’s the same picture as before, just this time the beds are occupied and their occupants are having a small talk about feelings that goes more and less like this "Hate is a bug that some of us have in the stomach"; "Incorrect, it's not in the stomach that hate is lodged, it is in the exocrine gland"; "no, I already had it removed, the doctors said that it was taken from my stomach"; "that's what they told you"; "but I have seen it also…"; "you have seen it… and so which was its color?"; “I guess it was some kind of dark magenta…", "Magenta! That is not a color… that is a fruit… a rotten kind of fruit it is…” and here our queen of none intervenes "I bring you the good news, my friends…"; and one of that guys says right away "we already know that you are going to marry untie, and you are actually looking for your broom, but we told you already, we haven't seen him for a long time… we know nothing about him, so please, leave us alone”. And now I open my eyes, coming back inside the posh car with nappa upholstery, the driver on my side looking from the road to me and from me to the road again. Now he is assuring that by looking at my attire, (dirty t-shirt, long shorts made from broken jeans and ripped tennis) he can read my lifespan. And so, I tell him to go ahead, if he can guess that, I would like to listen. “You weren’t properly loved as a child,  and you got the habit of closing yourself in your own world..” and... I, looking at him, I’m making as agreeing... Then, he also suggests that “We need to look around us, because inside the self we have only darkness…” and now I also make as agreeing... and then he follow this this “Due to your inadequacy to this world you haven't yet managed to get out of your adolescence period…” and curiously, I also make as agreeing as I listen that saying.. And then, “You are still looking for something sacred in all this moving around, but soon… soon you will get frustrated with all that searching…” and here I don't know if I should agree or no, but when he says that I “should look for dignity” I make as agreeing again, and then there are some silence between us, and there we stand, just facing the road, that is no more a road, just a white line in the middle of all this/that blackness. And after a while, there he goes again "When there is no longer any military or police monopoly, and when, therefore, insecurity is a constant… Individual violence and aggression will become a vital necessity... and, under the action of central organs, the physical force will establish a daily security... that is where the use of individual violence proves to be exceptional and the extreme and unbridled impulsiveness of men is no longer necessary or useful or even possible…” And again, our queen of none, ballerina shoes sliding along the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital, going up another flight of stairs, turning right, turning left, already getting in room 319A, where the two beds are empty, perfectly arranged, and everything in the right place. Our queen of none searches inside the wardrobe, opens the dresser, and even looks under the bed,  this before leaving and entering another room on the side, the 319B. And in this one there is someone seated on the bed, smoking, and  "What happened to those who were in the room next door? Were they discharged?", she demands, "Perhaps they have turned into flies and fled through the window", answered a dry kind of voice, from a man with no face. "And didn't they take you with them?”; "Why should they do that to me?" And me now, waking up again inside the teacher’s car, facing the road. Listening again, the blur speech from the driver, “that is to forget that violence was… from the most remote times, an imperative determined by the holistic organization of society... a behavior of honor and challenge... and as long as particular norms have priority over particular desires… honor and revenge continue to prevail... for exemple, the development of police apparatus, surveillance techniques and intensification of justice will only have a limited effect on private violence... hence the process of personalization that works to increase the responsibility of... individuals with aberrant behaviors, unstable, indifferent in some way to the principle of reality... and for this very reason... in line with the dominant and correlative narcissism… today the master's discourse is completely trivialized, desecrated, on equal footing with the media, and so, education is a machine neutralized by the school apathy, made of dispersed attention and jaunty skepticism about knowledge... and all this that I have just expressed, could be just… some kind of… black humor... because nowadays… for example... the sense of humor of the media, no longer tries to ridicule the logic... report or satirize the mistakes… The humor nowadays fills a factual function... It is not bad no more to confess personal problems... to show our own weaknesses... unravel the loneliness that we feel… nevertheless, the important now is to express all this in a second degree... through modernist hyperboles… and when I say modernist I mean…” And again, there goes our queen of none  running towards the stairs. This time she gets in the room 517B. And there are fishing lights by the head of one of the beds, and two individuals, rolled up in wrapping paper, are jumping on the bed, while making some animist cries. "What's going on here?"; "Today is St. John's night", "St. Anthony's night" corrects the other. "St. John," insists the first. And slowly, in slow motion,  our queen of nothing makes her way out, then ascends the last flight of stairs that takes her to the last food, and she now approaches the room 719A, she tries to open the door, but it doesn't go straight, it looks blocked by some object inside, so, our queen, force it a bit more, and finally she can open a breach of it and there are a robotic sort of voice, saying "you're too late, your fiancé is dead, he was very nervous because of the marriage, so I had to kill him”. And here I’m hearing the mad teacher again, “Disruptions are becoming increasingly rare, and the truth is that nowadays, the impression of déjà vu prevails over novelty, the new changes in society are monotonous, we no longer have the impression of living in a revolutionary period... there is a trend fall in creativity rate of the vanguards, which on the other hand… coincides with the very difficulty affirmation of anyone being truly vanguardist... the fashion of “isms” have passed, the noisy manifestations of other times are no more appreciated nowadays... but this doesn’t mean that… as in all great dichotomies, that one about the body and spirit also got blurred, the customization process, the expansion of the psychology have erased the oppositions and the rigid hierarchies... it has confused the reference points and the bold identities... The psychological process is a destabilizing agent... thus the body is no more relegated to a status of material positiveness… opposing itself to an ana-cosmic consciousness of undecidable space... an object-subject, a floating mélange of  sense and sensor… like Eutony and Yogra, Rolfing and Gestalt… Where does the body start and where does it end? If the body and the conscience of it are exchanged, if the body, in the mat of the unconscious, speaks, we must love and listen to it, it must express and expand our conscience, and our conscience should become physical…” And now, inside that room with a big spider moving through the ceiling, a big spider with a woman head, I see a body outstretched on the bed inside, a body all entangled with cobwebs, and my queen of none comes by and tries to remove some of the webs from this body, and then she hugs me, she laughs, she cries, all together and mixed, while running her hand over my face, and just then, I open my eyes, smiling, staring at her, and she realizes that this is really me, so she quickly bends down and begins to kiss me fervently, and then, that’s when the big spider on the ceiling descends over us and all gets black again. And so, now, as I wake up I see that man, my driver, that man that before was intoning that lame speech about the world of fashion is now stretched on the sofa, snoring, and I look around, and think, this should be his house, walls covered with bookshelves, a musty smell in the air and pictures of amorphous flowers between one shelf and another. And I'm not breathing well, I have to get out of here quickly, and so, very quickly I stand up and head to the main door, and there I go, passing on the side of the greenhouse and then, running towards the town. But I see no people, all are abandoned here. And so, in the meanwhile, I pass in front of some convenience stores, the windows covered with large brown papers and newspapers with news from the last century, and then I walk by a hairdresser with posters containing haircuts from the old heroes of the star-wars. And then I pass a farmacy full of old chemical products inside, stinking. And I pass some gift shops with broken windows, and I realize that there was some looting here, and then I pass one ready-to-wear boutique shop with naked, dismembered mannequins on the vitrine, and to my surprise I see a real girls inside, a girl with a fringe and shorts, and I see her playing with one of these old mannequins. So, I stop, staring at her, through the window, and she, she closes her eyes when she perceives my look. So, all of a sudden, I’m already inside, and straight away I tell her that I recognize her from my dream. “Ah and what do you mean with that, stranger?”; “Oh my dear, it's like seeing through water…”; “Really, and how am I like inside water?”; “I see your bright soul, tired of being trapped inside, it wants to fly, far away from here…”; “But, who do you think you are to say that, stranger?”; “Me? I'm like the clock sent through the washing machine, my dear, do you know about it?”; “Hum, I guess it tells me something... but from where are you coming, stranger, you might be coming from some distant place…”; “You are right my dear, I just arrived from the world's end, in truth I went there just to change my boots but…”; “Curious, I've also been to the world's end but I haven't seen you around there!”; “That's because I was there in a dark corner, recovering, but... now tell me, what could a beauty like you have to do in the world's end?”; “I went there to... buy some dresses!”; “And so, didn’t you find your number?”; “No, unfortunately I haven't found my right number there, nothing really fits me…” (and now as she says that I go towards her) “Listen dear, I know exactly who you are! I know!”; “Oh you know, so tell me who am I, and what am I doing here in this phantom town?”; “You're... that is, you're the queen of nooone!”; “ The queen of nooone? You mean, the queen of nothing? Oh! That is sad!”; “No my dear, it's not sad, one day we will meet again, please do not forget me…” And with this promise I retreat myself from there and run away from that phantom place. And so, I go along these no-people streets, I pass the abandoned banks, the abandoned malls, and then out of this village I go. I run across a field of red poppies now, still thinking about my queen of Nooone, my queen of Noone, my queen of None... and after I can't advance more... I throw myself on the floor, crying and crying and crying... I need love. I need her. I want to dream with her... I want her… And so, still sobbing, I manage to climb through some mossy rocks until the top... and once there... I lay on the peak of these same rocks, staring at those white rails crossing the blue sky, and there, after much staring, I see her again, mounting those rails of light.