Ground zero

After the collapse, I didn’t know where to start.
It was 1990.

There was no silence, as I had imagined.
There were debris.
Or rather, there was silence toward me.
That silence reserved for those who have betrayed.

But inside me, no.
There was no silence there.

Scattered pieces of thoughts, memories, plans.
They had no order, no recognizable shape.
There was no center around which to reorganize, no clear direction to follow.
Everything that had held me together until recently had come down, and I moved among the ruins, not knowing what to save and what to let go.

The bicycle was no longer there.
Or rather, it was still there, hanging in the garage, but it had become transparent.
I could no longer see it.
I no longer wanted to see it.
Maybe I felt betrayed, or maybe I was avoiding truly understanding what had happened.

I hadn’t decided to stop.
There was no clear choice, no definitive gesture.
It simply no longer belonged to my daily life.
As if it had remained buried under the debris along with everything else.
Without it, my body didn’t know where to go, and my mind had no foothold.

Without the bike, there was no ready alternative identity.
There was no “after” already written.
There remained a practical, concrete void: what to do with the time, the energy, the body that until recently had had a precise direction.
I moved, yes, but without orientation.

I looked for something else.
Not for passion.
Not for vocation.
Out of necessity.

I was looking for something that could replace what the bicycle had given me, without really succeeding.
I tried to blend in with others, to be part of their things, to speak their language.
It wasn’t conscious pretense.
It was adaptation.
An attempt to stay upright while the ground beneath me was missing.

In a way, I kept pretending.
Or maybe I simply put on a new mask.
One that worked well enough not to be noticed, not to cause problems, to get through the days without too many questions.
But beneath that mask, there was not yet a new form.
Only suspension.

And yet, even in absence, the bicycle continued to work.
It no longer guided my life, but it remained beneath, invisible.
The body remembered, even without movement.
It remembered a rhythm, a physical truth that had not yet found space to express itself.

Those years were Zero km.
Not a departure, but a reset.

I wasn’t going anywhere.
But, unknowingly, I was preparing the ground.
It would take a long time to realize it.

Meanwhile, I learned to conform: first drinks, the first girlfriend, first holidays, first summer jobs.
I have no bad memories of those times.
On the contrary, they did me a lot of good.
In a way, they shaped me, or unshaped me.
Perhaps they only showed me a simple, predictable aspect of myself.

I was still going to school, or rather, I went on alternate days when I couldn’t find anything better to do.
There, I think I truly understood what it means to waste time, even though, in an absolute sense, time is never really wasted.

There was a frustration under the embers.
Frustration I masked, but that manifested in borderline delinquent behavior.

Meanwhile, I had begun to forget that I had a body.
I gained weight, ate and drank anything.
I was on the verge of total divorce from my old self, yet a sort of “living apart under the same roof” still persisted for the moment.

Two or three years passed like that.
Then I went into the military.
School was over, after a record collection of failures.
I had started working.

I don’t exactly know what I did during the year in the military.
I began moving my body again for well-being: playing football, many matches, slowly regaining that confidence with physical effort.
Still no bike, but I imagine something had clicked physically.

I wouldn’t know how to categorize those three or four years in which I believe I never pedaled even once.
Perhaps that long abstinence, in the years to come, unleashed something that went beyond exercise and physical well-being.
Perhaps, from a certain point of view, these were the most important years to structure life as it would unfold only a few years later.

Meanwhile, after the military, I returned to work at the place I had worked before leaving.
Endless hours inside a warehouse, no sunlight, lots of stale air.
The embers crackled ever stronger.
It was becoming impossible not to feel them.