Motivational Picture
Wind breezes through the endless field of multicoloured flowers resting in silence under the clear blue sky. The floral display is deranged into a schizoid colour pattern without unity and clear divisions. Straight like a stick, Francescu stares at the horizon with the impatience of a child, gazing at the treasures lurking on the other side of the Earth. His eyes gleam wide, signalling a desperate hope as his facial muscles twitch in a madman smile. His pulse abruptly increases climaxing in an infarct. No doctors, no cars, no help. He dies watching the seemingly reachable hope behind those flowers.
Francescu’s body rests relieved from its owner or rather it looks like a relaxed man smelling the flowers. He wears a white shirt, as any good corporatist, and black trousers. Seen from a drone’s eyes, the captured image would be a typical motivational picture. The still body has no adrenaline rushes, no muscle contractions, no uncertainties, no sleepless nights, no unfulfilling hours spent on deciding whenever to follow the safe dry rout paved by his job or to become a photographer. In the end, his heart took the initiative. His forehead, of such a smooth skin, floats gently buried in dazzling colours.
The moon wakes up as the sky turns asleep. Selena, the planet, is looking at Francescu with such indifference. When the sky is already black, a sun appears on the road, no, two suns, and they are drawing closer to the corpse. As if out of darkness, from a bit afar, two men pop out under the dim moonlight, walking around the area shouting “Francescu!”. Soon, they open their lanterns and spend several minutes shouting after him. Before giving up, one of them returns to their original searching spot and sees him sleeping as if drunk. One goes closer to him and shakes his body, no sign. Then, they unproductively shout in his ear. His slumber is deep, they think. Even if they doubt their doubts, they still verify if he’s breathing. Shocked by the result, they try, as in movies, to pump air through his inert lips. No result. In the end, Francescu’s body is taken, and put it in the back sit creating the simulacrum of a sleeping human.
A year passed and the two men utterly forgot Francescu. Francescu was not their friend, was simply a co-worker, good at his job but distracted sometimes, as if lost in daydreaming. Luckily, on the Sunday of his death, they had a project proposal to discuss, yet he was nowhere to be found. They tried calling his parents, yet Francescu’s recent whereabouts were shred in mystery. Finally, they were able to determine his approximate location by talking with an acquaintance, a hotel manager. On Friday night, Francescu slept at that hotel, luckily for Gaia, since otherwise Francescu’s body would have muddled the beautiful fields of mother nature days on end.
Now, his body gently decomposes buried in a clean graveyard. His parents visit him, they offer flowers, they speak, yet nobody answers, and after an hour they let him rest (he has no other choice but rest). The parents return to the joyful swing of life. Nobody stands near Francescu. Francescu is insignificant, on an ultimate scale.
If Francescu were famous or if he had a good wife, would he have been remembered? The flowers respond that “nobody can judge whether Francescu mattered. What does this mean: to matter?” The clouds tell the flowers that “the cosmos is big, yet so small in comparison with the unknown”. The cell tells them both that “is nice in my pound, why bother?”. Living within a real dream one can see that in the end, one dies alone. That in the end, nothing absolute real can caress one into bliss. Through inquiry, we dissect this dream into images and concepts. All of this in one sentence: lost in our monadology we do phenomenology and daydream an ontology. His parents did not join the co-workers in their searched for Francescu, on the day of finding his corpse since his sudden death seemed an impossibility.
