If the Earth goes Bang!

I stopped by the window and watched the people in the street. What floor was that? Fifth? Sixth? From where I was I could only see men in motion with their cars in motion and mums in motion with their prams in motion, all of them keeping the world in motion. Why everybody had to keep moving? What was so important in keeping all these things in motion? Hundreds of people were populating that street, each one of them a bundle of worries, false expectations and unachievable dreams, all of them in motion.

Streets like that were all over the world. Interconnected. A huge network of ceaseless action. What if one day the Earth would go Bang!? A sudden explosion and all of us would end up into a cloud of dust. Would anybody be left in this Universe to receive this news with a bit of regret or a tinge of compassion? Would it be anybody to say: “Oh shit, we lost the people on Earth! We lost that beautiful planet! Four billion years of activity, of motion, of hopes and expectations, and they are all gone, turned into dust.’ Would it be anybody to say that? I mean anybody to keep a picture of us, to write an article about us, to lower the flags to half mast in our memory?

I raised my eyes to the sky. ‘Hello! Is it anybody out there to give a damn about us?’ Nietzche said that in heaven all the interesting people are missing and I suddenly went sad. It meant that waiting for a decent answer to my question was just time lost. The sky was heavy with rain and through that thick curtain of clouds I didn’t expect anybody to see me, interesting or not. Down in the street the mums and dads and prams and cars continued to stay in motion against all odds.

I rolled back my sleeves and looked at my bruises. They were the shape of broken egg yolks but in a totally different colour, a sort of aubergine verging into green. I couldn’t believe that such a thing just happened to us in a country where just six month ago we all agreed to start everything anew. The hospital was full of people like me who were tied to beds and connected to drips, some of us walking with crutches, some others pushed in wheelchairs, hoping that one day we’d get back home as healthy as we left it. We were all recovering from a terrifying experience in which our historic miners who worked hard for a living and made good neighbours in their community, fathers with families and kids, turned into criminals. They ran amok the city and beat people to death, innocent people who went out in the streets to protest against false promises. They pillaged and ransacked the main offices of our new political parties determined to inhibit our taste for democracy. They did it for Miron Cosma, their leader, and Cosma did it for Iliescu, the Architect, who found in Cosma the perfect ally in the fight to consolidate his power. I was still standing there in the window asking myself: Were we all rising up to that level of merit to fully deserve being fondly remembered in case that the Earth went Bang!?