one

He thought the smell of the jacket that has not been washed in years would make him throw up. He wanted to walk up to the man wearing it and ask him how dare he torture them like that. Clothes needed to be washed when they started to smell too much of people. It was simply unbearable; he thought he would collapse. Still, he was in a metro full of strangers and he could no longer think or speak in another language (baby, my English is terrible tonight). With the little patience he had left, he looked forward to leaving the underworld and breathing in the fresh October night he knew waited for him up there.

There was more; since time immemorial he was assailed by the same thought in a crowd, among the thronging multitudes. Standing surrounded by the bodies of strangers, pressing him all around, feeling their tiniest movements against his body, he often imagined one of them, most probably an ordinary man in his thirties, with a face revealing that he had not experienced much love on his skin, though from time to time he saw and heard that it existed, suddenly takes out a knife and randomly slashes at everything in his immediate vicinity. He imagined himself to be just one of the many people slashed, all of them standing in a circle, faceless victims of the man whose face is clearly visible, every feature standing out and becoming familiar to the general public that will read about him in tomorrow’s papers. And he feels that everybody, him included, is insignificant, just sheep someone decided to slaughter, and wondered what that would be like, to be born to make someone else’s face stand out in the crowd, to bring someone relief through an act of cruelty which he thought made him visible by gaining a twisted kind of identity at the expense of the invisible ones who just happened to stand there in the narrowest radius, mourned immediately after, and soon forgotten, completely irrelevant.

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