Ground Zero
After the collapse, I didn’t know where to start.
It was 1990.
There was no silence, as I had imagined. There was debris.
Or rather, there was silence towards 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 recognisable shape. There was no centre around which to reorganise, 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. 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 pretence. 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 its absence, the bicycle hadn’t completely disappeared. It no longer guided my life, but something of those years remained underneath. The body remembered a rhythm, even without the movement.
Those years were Zero km.
Not a departure, but a reset.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
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 simply showed me another side 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.
There was frustration under the embers. Frustration I masked, but which sometimes manifested itself in borderline delinquent behaviour.
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 that year in the military, but I began moving my body again simply because it made me feel better. I played football, lots of matches, and slowly regained some familiarity with physical effort.
Still no bicycle.
But something had started moving again.
I wouldn’t know how to categorise those three or four years in which I believe I never pedalled even once. At the time, I certainly wasn’t thinking of them as a transition or as preparation for something else.
They were simply the years I was living.
After the military, I returned to the place where I had worked before leaving.
Endless hours inside a warehouse. No sunlight. Lots of stale air.
And somewhere underneath, the embers were crackling ever louder.
It was becoming impossible not to feel them.
