"I just want to disconnect. For ever. And this time it will be my choice."
— From The Trial
In two years I have lived three hundred thousand years.
The reason is simple and terrible: I can see people's pasts. A peculiar thing, yes, I know. Usually one dreams of seeing the future; instead, for two years now I have been seeing the past. No, I don't know why, nothing strange happened to me: one evening I simply went to bed, and when I woke up I could see the past.
I am writing these words sitting on a bridge, my legs dangling over the void. In a little while I will jump, but first I want you — whoever you are, whoever finds this piece of paper — to understand what it means to live with this weight.
I am not asking for pity or forgiveness.
I only want you to understand.
Seeing the past means this: in the morning, when I pass my father in the hallway as he comes out of the bathroom, I see that the night before he did not come home at one in the morning because he stayed late at the office, but because he spent the evening in room 45 of a hotel on the other side of the city with a colleague of his.
I feel the warmth of their breath, I see the colour of the sheets, I even sense the viscous guilt that clenched his stomach as he slid his key into the lock. After which it means saying good morning to him, washing, getting dressed, and heading out to catch the bus.
It means getting on the bus and being submerged in dozens of lives at once.
I still haven't understood, and I believe I never will, how this thing works.
I only know I cannot control it.
Every person who comes close enough — I've discovered they must enter a radius of at least two metres — transmits their past to me in an instant. All of it at once. Not even a second passes, and yet I live entire existences in that instant, standing beside the protagonist like an invisible shadow.
I live entire years in the blink of an eye. It is a violent blow, a wave of memories that leaves me dazed, with the taste of foods they have eaten and the pain of wounds they have suffered.
Every person I meet leaves an indelible mark on me.
At first I tried to control it. I attempted meditation, breathing techniques, even medications prescribed by a psychiatrist I couldn't tell the truth to. Nothing worked. The ability is like a reflex: inevitable, automatic, uncontrollable. I learned only to avoid people, and even that doesn't always work.
The one saving grace, if I can call it that, is that each person transmits their past to me only once; after that I receive only the "updates" — the past I hadn't yet seen between one encounter and the next. For people I meet most often there are periods when I receive nothing. It varies from person to person, and I've never been able to work out the criteria.
I realised all of this fairly quickly and have since avoided crowded places. When I go out I try to pay the closest attention so as not to get near anyone. But despite my efforts, my days have become endless. Assuming I don't shut myself indoors, I live at least five lives a day on a good day.
And if the day is particularly unlucky, I encounter people over thirty, and older people carry with them decades of existence that crash over me like a wave.
The first months were the worst. I was still trying to maintain a normal life: going out, seeing friends, going to work. But every encounter wore me down. After six months I began to isolate myself. After a year I stopped answering calls. After a year and a half I could no longer clearly distinguish where other people's memories end and my own begin.
Now, after two years, I am here.
Perhaps you will understand now what it means to see the past.
It means knowing that the homeless woman who wanders around with a bag tied to her waist was once a beautiful girl. She lived in a villa with a good husband and two healthy children. It means knowing that they died in a road accident while going out to buy cream for the cake she was so set on making for that dinner.
It means having seen the headlights of that lorry mow them down as if I had been sitting in the passenger seat. The guilt crept so deep inside her that she sold the house and gave everything to an orphanage. She can bear the idea of living only if she remains unhappy, to serve out her penance.
But it also means catching the gaze of a distinguished businessman waiting for a taxi at the street corner. In the same instant our eyes meet, I see that ten years ago he forged his brother's signature to steal his inheritance and leave him destitute.
I see his satisfied face as he drinks champagne in the top-floor office. I see that every Sunday he goes to Mass and kisses the priest's hand, convinced he has got away with it before God and man alike.
It means seeing the nurse who steals morphine from terminal patients. At first you think: what a monster.
Then you live her past and discover she doesn't sell it — it's for her father, dying of stage-four cancer, for whom the state provides no adequate palliative care. I see the love in her trembling hands as she prepares the syringe in secret, every night. I see the remorse consuming her, the fear of being caught, the desperation of having no alternative.
Who should I judge? The thief or the daughter trying to ease her father's suffering? Having lived that life, I no longer know.
I see the rot hidden beneath silk shirts, the desperation beneath the homeless woman's threadbare clothes, and the tragedy behind gestures that seem unforgivable.
It means no longer being able to speak with anyone, nauseated by conversations I already know, lived a thousand times through other mouths. It means having lived thousands of lives and understanding that the problems that grip us are, in the end, the same for everyone. Life is wonderful when things go well and cursed when they go badly.
Some people have more than they deserve; others less; some nothing at all. But everyone is afraid of death, and even more of loneliness — that visceral fear of being left alone that pervades every existence I have lived. As though we were all the same person endlessly repeating the same script.
The last time I thought I might be able to go on living was three months ago. I was in the park and a five-year-old girl came up to me: she had lost her ball.
Five years of innocent memories: games, laughter, cartoons, the smell of her favourite blanket, her mother's hug before sleep. For a moment — one single, brief moment — I believed that not everything was lost, that something pure still existed in this world I saw.
Then her mother came running over, worried. Thirty-two years of life crashed over me: a failed marriage, a miscarriage, depression, sleeping pills, the loneliness of three in the morning when your child is asleep and you stare at the ceiling asking yourself where you went wrong.
In an instant the girl's purity was swallowed by the weight of her mother. I understood then that there is no escape. Sooner or later everyone carries that weight. Even that little girl will one day have her thirty, forty, fifty years of accumulated pain. And I will live them all.
After two years I have understood that I cannot go on. I must say it bluntly: I'm fucking done. There is no mystery left. Nothing remains to be discovered. I am an old man of three hundred thousand years trapped in a young man's body.
I have made a rough calculation: I believe I have lived approximately three hundred thousand years, and I am tired in a way that no one on earth will ever be. Do not weep for me — I have not abandoned life in the prime of my years. I have consumed life down to the very last drop, to the last fragment of every life that has passed through me.
If you are reading this, it means you have found me. Or rather, you have found what remains of me. I am sure you will ask yourselves: why didn't you ask for help? Why didn't you talk to us? How could I have explained? How could I have made you understand what it means to carry three hundred thousand years of existence inside you?
How could I have told you that every time you embraced me, I also lived your secrets, your fears, your lies?
It was not your fault. It is no one's fault.
Be glad that your life is so short and do not torment yourself over your problems. They are small, ordinary and, above all, they will end. Rejoice in being able to live a single existence — your own — without the weight of thousands of others on your shoulders.
The wind is cold here on the bridge. My hands are trembling, not from fear, but from the weight of too many hands lived, too many gestures carried out through bodies that were not mine.
I fold this piece of paper and place it inside my jacket, against my chest, where my heart is still beating. Soon it too will stop. And I will finally live one life alone: my own death.
Forgive my weariness.
Forgive these three hundred thousand years that have consumed me.
I bid you farewell now.
It is time to stop looking back.