Mortality

A friend of mine picks me up on his way back from the gym, he needs to go home and take a shower before we join another friend for dinner. As usual, I start blabbering randomly about the insignificant events of my day before he interrupts me and says "Man, you're totally wasted." A fact that I keep denying throughout the entire evening, unaware that my reeking breath was contradicting my words all along.

At his house, I collapse in this huge, armless, American style, white – or ivory as he might argue – chair. As I wait for him to finish, my eyes start hunting through the books in his library, and I end up picking Kundera's "Immortality", a clearly unsuitable choice given the preceding circumstances or my prevailing condition.

Anyway, I skim through the pages, searching for hidden messages from God or his demons, a habit from my early reading days when I used to believe that any book can be genuinely projected on the reader's personal life without compromising the writer's attempt to reflect his own. And finally, my eyes fall on this sentence: "I have too high a concept of life. Either life gives me everything or I'll quit."

And that was it. The shock I needed to revive my sobriety back from the dazing depths of my dreams. Thus, the thoughts battle once again to corrupt my spirits, and I start wondering when I actually decided to quit. Was it when my goals were set too high, just beyond the limits of what my life can afford to give? Or was it long before that, when I realized that deep down inside I was never truly interested in what it had to offer?

Damn Kundera and his words, they can only spoil your mood and ruin your evenings.