The Other Symphony

The message appeared as a small, green bubble on his phone's screen, a digital emissary from a life he felt he was slowly drifting away from. It was from Leo. Coffee? It’s been a while. For a moment, the old reflexes kicked in: a tightening in his chest, a cascade of thoughts about what he would say, how he would explain his recent silence, his strange new state of being. The thought of a conversation felt like a performance for which he no longer knew the lines. But then, the feeling from the post office, the lesson of the glass of water, surfaced. This too was a practice. An invitation to see. He typed back a simple reply: Yes. Let me know where.

They met at a place downtown, a café that was the opposite of the quiet, timeless corner spot from his first walk. This one was loud, sleek, and busy. The air buzzed with the aggressive hiss of the espresso machine and a cacophony of conversations, all competing for space. It was the sound of the world’s ambition, its relentless forward momentum. Leo was already there, waving from a small table, his face illuminated by the screen of his phone.

“Marco! Good to see you,” he said, his smile genuine but quick, already moving on to the next thought. “This place is crazy, right? But the coffee is supposed to be amazing.”

The first twenty minutes were a monologue. Leo spoke with a rapid, anxious energy, recounting the intricate politics of his office, the promotion he was chasing, the infuriating saga of a dispute with his landlord, the car that was making a strange noise. His words were a torrent of facts, frustrations, and desires. Marco listened. In the past, he would have felt a familiar mix of boredom and pressure—pressure to offer advice, to share a complaint of his own, to keep the ball of conversation bouncing back and forth. He would have been cataloging Leo’s problems and comparing them to his own.

But today, he practiced. While Leo’s words filled the air, Marco tried to listen to something else beneath them. He listened to the rhythm of his friend’s speech, the tension in his voice, the way his hands gestured, clenching and unclenching. He heard not just the story of the landlord, but the deeper story of a desire for a safe, stable place in the world. He heard not just the complaint about a difficult boss, but the fear of not being seen, of not being valued. He was listening to the other symphony, the complex, sometimes dissonant music of a human heart navigating its own anxieties. He felt a wave of empathy, so clean and clear it surprised him. This was not his old friend Leo, the collection of problems. This was a consciousness, just like his own, caught in the powerful currents of the world, trying to stay afloat.

Eventually, Leo’s torrent of words slowed to a trickle. He took a long sip of his coffee and sighed, the sound momentarily lost in the café’s din. “Anyway,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Enough about my mess. I’ve been talking non-stop. You’re quiet. What’s been going on with you? You seem… calm.”

The question hung in the air. Here it was. The moment to explain. The old Marco would have scrambled for an answer, a summary of a new project, a vague statement about “taking some time for himself.” The new Marco simply sat with the question, feeling no urgency to fill the space. He thought of the glass of water, of the impossibility of describing the ocean. He knew that words like “awakening” or “interconnectedness” would be meaningless, alienating. They were containers, and Leo needed to feel the water, not just be told about it.

So he chose a single, true thing.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time just looking at things,” Marco said, his voice quiet but clear. “The other day I spent an hour looking at a glass of water on my desk. I tried to imagine its whole journey to get there.”

Leo stared at him, a slight frown on his face. He was waiting for the punchline, for the part where this observation connected to a larger project, a book idea, a new philosophy. But Marco offered nothing else. He just held his friend’s gaze, his presence calm and open. The silence stretched, but it wasn't awkward. It was spacious.

In that space, something shifted. Leo’s anxious energy, having nothing to push against, began to dissipate. He stopped looking for an angle, a meaning, and for the first time since they’d sat down, he just was. He blinked, and his gaze drifted to the window, to the blur of traffic passing by. He picked up his coffee cup, and instead of gulping it down, he looked at it, at the intricate pattern of the foam on top.

“A glass of water, huh?” Leo said, a soft, curious smile playing on his lips. “Must have been some pretty interesting water.”

“It was,” Marco said, smiling back.

They sat for a few more minutes, the conversation replaced by a shared, comfortable silence. The noise of the café was still there, but it felt more distant, as if they were in a small, quiet bubble. They were not talking about their lives, but for the first time that afternoon, they felt like they were truly sharing a moment of it. Marco’s calm had not been a wall; it had been a doorway. By refusing to engage in the usual frantic exchange of anxieties, he had offered his friend a moment of rest.

When they parted ways on the busy sidewalk, the handshake felt different. It was warmer, more present. “It was good to see you, man,” Leo said, and his eyes held Marco’s for a second longer than usual. “Really. We should do this again.”

Walking home, Marco felt a quiet sense of clarity. He had not fixed his friend’s problems. He had not explained his new world. He had simply brought the quality of his attention to their meeting. He had practiced listening to the symphony of another person, even when their words were full of static. He realized that connection was not always about finding common ground in stories and opinions. Sometimes, it was about creating a shared silence, a small, sacred space where two people could simply breathe together in the midst of the world’s noise. He had not taught his friend how to fly, but for a brief moment, he had helped him feel the ground beneath his feet.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

The Language of Water

 He found himself back at the desk, in the quiet stillness of his room. The same blank page from days ago waited for him, a patient, white field of possibility. But the man looking at the page was different. The paralyzing awe that had silenced him before, the feeling of being too small to describe something so vast, had subsided. So too had the cold grip of the anxiety that had ambushed him yesterday morning. What remained was a quiet curiosity, a focused calm. The page was not a challenge to be conquered, nor a void to be feared. It was simply a space. And he had a new, fragile understanding of how to enter it.

He picked up the pen. His first instinct was to recount the moments of clarity, to narrate the experience in the café, to explain the symphony. He wrote: I went to a café and saw an old man make a coffee. He stared at the sentence. The words were true, but they were lifeless. They were a container with none of the content, a map with none of the territory. The sentence described an event, a sequence of actions in linear time, but the experience itself had not been linear. It had been a web, a resonance, a simultaneous unfolding of past, present, and sensory detail. Conventional language, he realized, was the language of the post office queue. It was designed for transactions, for conveying facts from point A to point B. It was not designed to hold the light.

Frustration flickered, a faint echo of the old static. He could feel the shadow’s temptation to whisper that this was impossible, that he was failing. But the lesson from the post office returned to him: the choice to adjust his focus. The memory of the clerk’s tiny photograph, the smiling dog. He had found a way into her humanity not by understanding her whole life, but by focusing on one small, tangible detail.

He put the pen down again. Perhaps the task was not to describe the entire ocean. Perhaps it was simply to describe a single drop of it with perfect attention. He let his gaze drift across the desk, past the books and the inert pen, and it settled on the most ordinary of objects. A glass of water. He had poured it an hour ago and forgotten about it. It sat there, unassuming, half-full. He decided this would be his practice. Not to write about the universe, but to see the universe in this glass of water.

He leaned forward, looking. Really looking. At first, it was just that: a glass, water, light. But as he softened his focus, the object began to unfold. He noticed the way the light passed through the water, bending at the surface, creating a shimmering, distorted image of the wood grain of the desk beneath it. The glass was a lens, altering the world it contained. On its curved surface, the reflection of his window was warped into a long, dreamlike oval of light. Tiny bubbles clung to the inside of the glass, miniature pearls of air, each one a perfect sphere holding its own tiny, upside-down reflection of the room.

His mind began to follow the story of the water. This water, cool against the glass, where had it been? He imagined it as vapor, invisible in the vast blue of the sky, a part of a cloud drifting over an ocean. He felt the sudden coolness as it condensed into rain, falling over a distant, green mountain range he had never seen. It trickled through soil and rock, joining a stream, then a river, a silent, patient journey of miles and years. It was pulled into the city’s hidden circulatory system, a dark, roaring network of pipes and pumps, a mechanical river flowing beneath the symphony of the street. Then, finally, a turn of his own hand at a faucet, a splash and a gush, and its long journey ended here, in this quiet glass, on his desk.

Then he considered the glass itself. A vessel born of fire and sand. He thought of sand on a beach, countless grains of worn-down rock and shell, each a relic of geological time. He imagined the intense, roaring heat of the furnace that had melted it back into a liquid, erasing its history as sand to give it a new future as glass. Was it shaped by the careful breath of a human artisan, or the precise, unfeeling grip of a machine? Either way, it was a testament to transformation, a solid thing that carried the memory of being liquid, of being fire, of being stone.

He picked up the pen. This time, he did not try to write about the glass of water. He tried to write from it. He let the sensations and the imagined histories flow onto the page, without trying to force them into a neat, linear narrative. The words that came were different.

River-memory in a cage of glass.

A silent journey through dark veins of iron.

Sunlight, bent and dreaming at the bottom.

Fire-ghost, holding water.

The sentences were fragments. They were impressions. They didn't explain anything. But as he read them back, he felt a flicker of the truth of the experience. He had not captured the thing itself, but he had captured a resonance, an echo of it. This was the new language. It was not a language of description, but of translation. A translation of a perception, a feeling, into a texture of words.

He looked at the few lines on the page. They were not a story. They were not a poem, not in any traditional sense. They were a fossil of a moment of attention. And it was enough. The vastness of the world no longer felt like a burden on his ability to express it. It had become an infinite source of these small, translatable moments. He had not written a chapter, but he had found a single, true word. And he knew, with a quiet certainty that settled deep in his bones, that his work was simply to find the next one.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

The First Shadow

 It began with a sound that did not belong. A shrill, digital pulse that pierced the soft grey fabric of the morning. The alarm clock. For a moment, the sound tried to weave itself into the city’s distant hum, a strange, sharp note in a familiar melody. But it pulsed again, clean and insistent, refusing to harmonize. It was a summons, a sharp tug on a thread that pulled him back from a place of open awareness into a world of schedules and obligations. His body felt heavy, as if gravity, having been a gentle companion, had reasserted its full, dense authority upon him during the night.

He silenced the alarm. The quiet that followed was hollow, ringing with the ghost of the electronic shriek. He sat up. Light filtered through the blinds, casting strips of brightness on the floor. Particles of dust hung in the air, their dance today seeming random, a simple consequence of air currents in a room that needed cleaning. A new voice, an old voice, began to whisper in his mind. It spoke in the language of simple facts, the language of ‘just’. It’s just light. It’s just dust. It’s just a Tuesday morning. The voice was a subtle filter, draining the world of its resonance, leaving behind its plain, unadorned shape.

A familiar tightness coiled in his stomach, a cold knot of memory. His eyes fell upon a letter on his desk, a crisp white rectangle in the soft light. A bill, overlooked. Its formal, printed address felt like an accusation. The number printed inside it was a weight, and with that weight came the old thoughts, seeping back into his mind like a slow tide. There isn’t enough. You need to do more. You’re falling behind. The feeling of cosmic connection evaporated, replaced by the acute, painful awareness of his dwindling bank account.

He knew he had to go to the post office. The thought of the walk was a chore. He dressed, the fabric of his clothes feeling coarse against his skin. The ritual felt empty, a pantomime of a person preparing for a day. As he descended the stairs, he tried to tune into the whispers of the past, the history held in the worn stone. He could still sense them, but they were distant, their frequency obscured by the loud static of his own anxiety.

The street felt altered. The city’s music was still playing, he supposed, but it was a radio station struggling with a weak signal. The sounds of traffic grated, sharp and metallic. The faces in the crowd seemed veiled, each person moving within a private fog of purpose and worry. He saw his own reflection in them. The walk was a journey through a landscape of muted colors, a world seen through a dusty pane of glass. A quiet panic tightened his chest, the fear that the door he had opened was slowly swinging shut.

The post office was the heart of this muted world. The air, smelling of paper and institutional cleaning fluid, was thin and sterile. The flat, unforgiving light from the fluorescent tubes overhead seemed to bleach everything of its character. People stood in a silent, orderly queue, their gazes fixed on the red digital display ticking towards their number. It was a place of transactions, a place where humanity was processed. He took a number and found his place in the line, feeling his own energy thinning in the sterile atmosphere. This, he thought, is where the world is sorted, stamped, and sent away in sealed envelopes.

He watched the woman behind the counter. She moved with a weary efficiency, her face set in a mask of professional neutrality. Her voice, calling out numbers through a small speaker, was metallic, without inflection. Marco felt the old sense of alienation return, the feeling of being a cog in a vast, indifferent machine. The grey feeling was thickest here. He closed his eyes for a second, hearing only the hum of the lights and the rhythmic thud of the clerk’s rubber stamp. A sound of finality.

Then, a memory surfaced: the barista’s hands, moving with such grace. An image of connection. He opened his eyes and looked at the clerk again, trying to change the frequency of his own perception. He began to search for details. He saw the way she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. He noticed a tiny, framed photo of a smiling dog taped to the side of her computer monitor. He saw the slight weariness in her shoulders that spoke of a long shift, of a life lived beyond this counter. He didn’t know her story, but the simple act of looking for one was enough to change the air around him. He knew that beneath the uniform was a landscape as vast and complex as any other.

The fluorescent hum didn't transform into a celestial choir, but a tiny point of warmth ignited in the grey. It was a choice. He was choosing to see. When his number was finally called, he walked to the counter. As he passed her the bill, he met her eyes and offered a small, genuine smile. For a fleeting second, the professional mask on her face softened, and she returned the smile, a flicker of shared humanity in the sterile air. The transaction was completed, but something else had been exchanged.

Walking out of the post office, the world had not magically reverted to a symphony. The knot in his stomach had not completely dissolved. But he carried a new understanding, one forged in the quiet friction of the morning. The awakening was not a permanent state of grace. It was a practice. It was the daily, sometimes hourly, choice to tune the dial of his perception, to actively listen for the music behind the static, to offer a sliver of connection in a world of transactions. Flying, he now knew, was not a destination. It was the constant, conscious, and sometimes tiring adjustment of the wings.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

The Symphony of the Street

The coffee. It had risen all the way up there, a dark, aromatic wave that had knocked on the glass of his window, on the door of his perception. The pen remained there, inert on the page, a small sleeping spindle. What word could ever have contained that journey? What grammar could have possibly bridled the world’s breath? To write would have been to betray, to pigeonhole, to reduce an ocean to a drop of ink. To live, perhaps. To live was the only possible translation, the only form of honest writing. The door opened in an act of surrender to the world that pressed from outside, that breathed with its thousand lungs of concrete and asphalt.

And now the steps, these stone teeth worn down by lives not his own, and yet so intimately his, now. Yesterday, a simple incline to be overcome quickly, a Jacob’s ladder with neither angels nor revelations. Today, a rosary of footsteps, each bead a story whispered by the dust. He could feel them, the anxious sprints of a young student running late, the weight of a disappointment dragging up the ramps in the shoes of a middle-aged man, the ephemeral lightness of good news that made a young woman skip. For a moment, he imagined a little girl, perhaps in the seventies, sitting on that chipped step, counting ants while waiting for her mother to return, her world contained in the tiny cosmos between the cracks. His own footstep joined all the others, an echo adding itself to the building's silent choir.

Then, the street. The impact was a total immersion. That same corner, a month ago—was it a month? or a century?—was an ambush of hostile noises. The cars, snarling metal beasts ready to devour his thoughts. The people, an opaque river in which he feared he would drown. Now the tram’s run on the rails was a violin bow stretched across the city’s soundboard, a long, vibrant lament of pure existence. The faces had become landscapes. In a flash, he could see the crack of a worry on the forehead of a man in a suit, the glimmer of a memory in the eyes of a woman pushing a stroller, the silent defiance in the gaze of a boy leaning against a wall, a defiance that was not anger but a fragile shield against a world he was still learning to navigate. It all belonged to him, it all resonated within him as if his soul had suddenly become porous, permeable.

He watched a child break away from her mother’s hand to chase a flock of pigeons. Their frantic explosion into the air was a burst of pure, uncalculated joy, and in the child’s laughter, Marco heard the sound of a freedom he was just beginning to understand. He stopped to watch a florist arranging her tulips; her fingers, stained with soil, moved with a delicacy that seemed to orchestrate the colors, a silent conversation with life itself. The bright red of the petals was a high, shrill note in the street’s visual symphony, a splash of passion against the grey canvas of the pavement.

He followed the aroma, that Ariadne's thread that had called him out of his labyrinth. It led him to a faded sign, "Corner Café," and his heart welcomed the sight with a quiet rhythm, that of recognition. It was a returning, more than an arriving. Inside, time seemed thicker, a golden honey made of light, steam, and hushed chatter. The air hummed with its own life. He noticed the way the light fractured through the glass sugar dispensers, casting tiny rainbows on the worn wooden counter. There were other lives suspended in that little cosmos: an old man reading the newspaper, the lenses of his glasses magnifying a world of already old news, his posture a testament to a thousand such mornings; two girls laughing softly, sharing a secret that created an invisible bubble of complicity around them. And behind the counter, the hands. Even before the face, he saw the man’s hands. A landscape of veins and wrinkles, a map of infinite dawns etched into skin. How many cups had known that touch? How many silent confessions had they absorbed, from this side of the counter, in the gesture of serving a coffee?

"A coffee." His voice was just a ripple in the warm air of the room.

The man looked up, and his eyes—two small slits of a well-lived sky—gazed at him with a depth that went beyond mere seeing. There was an instant in which Marco felt that his entire story, his fear, and his recent, fragile discovery had been understood in that single, quiet gaze. The gesture with which the man began to prepare the coffee became a ceremony. The whir of the grinder, a guttural chant. The sharp, decisive knock to settle the grounds, a drumbeat. The hiss of the steam, a primordial breath escaping the machine’s silver lungs. The dark powder, a fertile earth. The water, an essential rain. The cup, a small, porcelain world waiting to be filled.

And when he drank, the bitter, deep flavor was a short circuit of the senses and of memory. He closed his eyes. In that dark drop was the slope of a mountain in Colombia, the sun beating down on a farmer’s back, the sound of a language he did not know, the rhythmic sway of a ship in a distant harbor, the smell of jute and of spices in a roaster’s warehouse. There was the entire, incredible chain of giving and taking, of toil and pleasure, of countless hands and infinite miles that had conspired to create this single moment of communion. The man drinking coffee in a bar dissolved, leaving a universe tasting itself.

When he stepped outside, the afternoon light enveloped him in an embrace. The city continued its complex music. The Marco who walked in the city blurred, melted away, until it was the city that walked in him. The symphony became the very rhythm of his blood.

 Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

The World That Breathes

The morning light filtered through the blinds, drawing long, luminous stripes across the parquet floor of Marco’s room. Once, that glow was a simple signal of a new day, an invitation to resume routine. Now it was a liquid wave of meaning, a shimmering veil that revealed the invisible history of suspended dust particles. Each grain danced, not in a random movement, but in a choreography that seemed to tell the eternal cycle of life and death, of form and dissolution. Marco sat on the bed, the sheet slipped to the floor. His body responded with a new heaviness, a grounding that contrasted with the ethereal journey just concluded. His mind, however, was light, a silent point of observation in the midst of a universe that had learned to breathe.

The sounds from the street, once a bothersome background, now composed a symphony. A car's horn, the screech of a tram, the voice of a street vendor: each sound was a fragment of a larger melody. The grey of the concrete, the monotony of the buildings, the haste of passersby were no longer indifference. They were tangible symbols of a collective will moving in one direction, a single invisible current of desires and fears. Marco recognized in that flow the massification he had feared, but he didn't see it as an external threat. He perceived it as an inner vastness, a potential for connection that he had the faculty to explore or to ignore.

A scent of coffee made its way to his open window. It was a familiar smell, yet charged with a new, profound meaning. Marco didn't just smell the aroma. He perceived the image of an old man in the corner café, his meticulous gesture as he filled a small cup, the steam rising like a wisp of incense. He saw the entire chain of events that had brought that scent to him: the distant land where the coffee had grown, the hands that had picked it, the long journey. Everything was interconnected, every single link in the chain resonating with a cosmic echo. The world was not a collection of objects, but a network of stories, an intertwining of relationships that manifested in every detail, even the most mundane.

He rose and walked toward the small mirror hanging on the wall. His reflection smiled back at him. It wasn't the smile of a man who had solved all his problems. It was the smile of someone who had understood that the real problem wasn't the world, but his limited perception. Marco's eyes, in the reflection, seemed to contain an older light. He saw his own fears and uncertainties, but they were just smudges on the glass, not the essence of what he was. The image in the mirror was a face. The image beyond the gaze was the essence he had learned to know in the dream.

Marco dressed slowly, choosing his clothes as if they were armor. Each gesture was a ritual act, a way to assert his uniqueness in a world that pushed for conformity. He sat down at the desk and picked up a sheet of paper, a pen. His instinct led him to write, to give form to that new awareness. But words seemed inadequate, too small to contain the vastness he felt. He would write, he thought, but with a new language. He would try to translate the dream experience into reality, to build bridges between the visible and the invisible. His life, from that moment, would become an artistic and philosophical quest, a continuous attempt to name the unspeakable.

The journey had just begun. He had understood that flying was not about detaching from reality. It was about confronting it with a new perspective, with eyes that saw beyond the surface, with ears that heard the hidden symphony. Marco's room was no longer a refuge. It was a starting point. The city outside the window was no longer a labyrinth from which to escape, but a new chapter to explore. Marco felt ready. He had found the key to read the world. He just had to learn to write his own story.

He paused, the pen suspended above the blank paper. Closing his eyes, he recalled that smile in the mirror, an image that was a bridge between two worlds. He heard the beat of his consciousness, a sound that was an echo of the cosmic breath. The veil had lifted, and the world, in all its apparent banality, had begun to breathe. And he, Marco, was there, ready to breathe with it.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

The Transformed Self

The tremor intensified, shaking the surface of primordial glass. Marco felt no panic. He felt a quiet certainty: the journey into the realm of transcendence had reached a pause. The cosmic globes retreated into the darkness, the figure of light dissolved into an echo of wisdom, and the air grew dense, heavy, familiar. The return to ordinary perception was gradual and inevitable, like re-emerging from the ocean's depths toward the sunlit surface. The dream experience released him with a gentleness that was, in itself, part of its final lesson.

When he opened his eyes, the grey of his room returned. This time, it wasn't an anonymous hue. It was a silent mosaic that held all the colors of the landscapes he had traversed: the salt desert, cobalt skies, and the depth of obsidian. The bare, anonymous walls now resonated with the infinite surfaces of the mirrors. The stack of books on the nightstand, once a disorganized pile of paper, appeared as a labyrinth of stories, both collective and personal. Marco rose slowly, feeling the weight of his body with a new, strange awareness. His arms, his legs, were the vehicle of an experience that transcended the physical. Every movement was a choice, every breath an act of will. He was no longer an automaton, but a Self in command of his own ship.

He walked to the window. The rain tapping against the glass was just water, but he heard in it the sound of the tears and joys of the past pouring into the present. The outside world was no longer a solid, unquestionable reality. It was a complex symphony of symbols. Passersby hurrying under their umbrellas were no longer an indistinct mass, but a collection of Selves, each with its own inner labyrinth, its own salt desert, its own shattered mirrors. The veil that had lifted in the dream was now transparent in his waking state. Marco saw the world for what it was and for what it symbolized, for the echo of the dream that resonated in every detail of his life. Life itself had become a constant translation, an uninterrupted interpretation.

This new perception, however, wasn't a simple gift. It was a burden. The weight of every gesture, every word, was felt with a new, almost overwhelming responsibility. The freedom he sought in the dream wasn't an escape. It was a painful integration, the freedom to consciously choose his own path, knowing that his own truth existed, fragmented and whole. Massification and heteronomy were no longer abstract concepts. They manifested in a tangible, almost grotesque way in billboards that promised illusory happiness, in shop windows with identical clothes, in the tired and distracted faces of those around him. Every face, every object, was a call to conformity, a silent voice inviting him to return to comfortable anonymity.

A wave of nostalgia swept over him, but not for the past. It was a nostalgia for the clarity of the dream, for the incontestable logic of that inner world. There, the figures of the shadow and of transcendence had been pure, clear, unequivocal entities. Here, in reality, they were mixed, dirty, and difficult to distinguish. His mind sought distinction; his heart yearned for transparency. Marco felt like a musician who had just heard the most sublime melody and now had to return to playing a simpler score, with the memory of that music that never fades. The dissonance between his new awareness and external reality was almost unbearable, an open wound that could only be healed with understanding.

It was then that an insignificant detail struck him. On his desk, a cup of coffee left the night before was there, half-full, with the liquid now cold and thick. In an instant of pure and inexplicable lucidity, Marco saw beyond the object. He saw the infinite cycle of day and night, the invisible work of the barista, the time that had stopped in that moment, and the desire to stay awake that the cup represented. He saw the Self who had left that cup and the Self who was looking at it now, an experience that connected him to himself and to the entire universe at once. It was not a hallucination. It was a vision, a comprehension that manifested with the same force and clarity as a symbol in a dream. The cup was a portal, a fragment of existence that contained within it the history of the world.

Marco had found the key to navigate this new reality. The journey was not over. He hadn't returned home; he had transformed it into a new canvas, a new stage for exploration. His awakening was not a return, but an evolution, a leap in consciousness. His room was no longer a prison, but a starting point. The outside world was not an alien entity; it was a continuation of his own inner world. With a sense of excitement mixed with a deep calm, Marco realized that his flight had just begun, and he would do it with his eyes open.

The dream journey had just become a waking matter.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

Beyond the Veil

The shimmering obsidian dissolved into a whirl of luminous particles, as if the air itself were pulverizing into a thousand reflections. Marco found himself in a place of deafening silence, but this time the void felt vibrant, charged with a palpable energy. The surface beneath his feet was smooth and cold, similar to primordial ice. Above him, an immense cosmic vault stretched, dotted not by stars, but by infinite globes of soft light. Each was a miniature universe, expanding and contracting slowly, like a breath. Time and space, concepts that had felt immutable until now, lost their meaning here, becoming mere illusions of limited perception. Marco felt that every moment he had lived was part of an eternal present, a sensation that enveloped him with a sense of vertigo and, at the same time, of profound peace.

In this place, gravity had lost all power. His body felt light, almost ethereal. Thoughts flowed with a clarity he had never experienced. The confusion of previous chapters, the weight of the shadow, the nostalgia for the past: everything had settled, leaving a lucid and crystalline calm. Here, questions were no longer anxious whispers, but outlines of truth beginning to take shape, almost to materialize. Marco no longer sought definitive answers, but the possibility of asking better questions. He had understood that the search was not an act of conquest, but a process of discovery, a continuous unveiling.

A brighter glow captured his attention. From one of the luminous globes, larger and closer, a figure emerged. It was an aggregation of light and shadow that emanated an immense serenity and boundless knowledge. It had no voice, yet Marco felt it speak directly into his mind with pure concepts, with the undeniable certainty of eternal truths. These were not words, but waves of comprehension that flooded his consciousness, an experience that transcended language and every form of human communication. The figure moved with a grace that did not belong to this world, dancing among the luminous globes like a shooting star that had found its peace.

"You have come to the veil," a soundless resonance echoed in his consciousness. "Here, form dissolves, and meaning is revealed."

Marco felt he was in front of a primordial force and felt no fear, only respect. The entity was not there to judge him, but to guide him through the unknowable. "What do I seek?" Marco asked, not with his lips, but with the entire essence of his being, an echo of an echo in the vastness of the cosmos.

The figure of light expanded and a flood of images and sensations inundated his mind. He saw the vastness of the cosmos, the fragility of a blade of grass bending in the wind, the unbroken cycle of birth and death. The apparent chaos concealed a perfect and incomprehensible order, a dance of atoms and galaxies moving in unison. The loneliness of the individual, his being a universe unto himself, coexisted with the profound interconnectedness of everything, the awareness that every choice he made, every breath he took, was part of an immense network of causality. It was a totalizing experience that contained all possible answers, without giving any. Marco understood that the search for meaning was not the discovery of a formula, but the acceptance of complexity, the embrace of mystery. Meaning was the path itself, the act of asking questions, of seeking, and of accepting not knowing as an act of faith.

"The Self," the voice continued without sound, "is the point of observation, the spark that perceives, the fragment of the whole that seeks to reunite." The luminous entity showed him images of infinite Selves, each in a different state of awareness, all part of a single, immense flow. There was no judgment in these images, only the serene observation of an eternal process.

Marco understood that the automatism and massification he had so greatly feared were not external enemies, but internal temptations. They were the easy way out to avoid facing the vertigo of freedom, the siren singing the melody of conformity. True transcendence was not about fleeing reality, but about understanding it on a deeper level, integrating the dream into wakefulness, chaos into order, fragility into strength. To be "Free to Fly" meant accepting one's uniqueness without fear, embracing one's heteronomy as a gift, not a burden. It didn't mean having all the answers, but having the courage to ask the right questions and to accept uncertainty as an integral and indispensable part of the human condition.

The figure of light began to withdraw slowly into its cosmic globe, fading like a dream that recedes upon waking. The energy in the hall diminished, the silence grew lighter, and the surface beneath his feet began to vibrate. It was no longer the mechanical hum of the mirrors, but a tremor that announced an imminent change, a new beginning.

Marco was alone again, but he no longer felt that way. He was filled with a profound peace, a clarity that resonated in every cell of his being. He had gained an understanding that went beyond words. He had looked beyond the veil, and what he had found was not an end, but an expansion. His Self, though fragmented, now felt part of something infinitely larger, while still maintaining its unmistakable uniqueness. The return to reality, whatever it might be, would be different. The flight was imminent.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

Memory's Labyrinth - Past and Identity

The shimmering obsidian of the mirror hall vanished, dissolving like cold smoke. Marco found himself in a different kind of silence, no longer the deafening one of the deep psyche, but a distant echo of familiar voices, almost a murmur. The air, once sharp, grew dense, impregnated with childhood scents: hay wet from summer rain, old paper and ink, Grandma's freshly baked cake. The landscape slowly composed itself around him, no longer surreal, but a faithful, yet distorted, reproduction of his grandparents' house. The walls were tilted, the windows too large, the roof sagged like a crumpled hat, but every detail—the grain of the porch wood, the geranium pot on the windowsill, the rusty swing under the big oak—was intact, laden with an unbearable weight of time and memory.

A knot tightened in his throat. This wasn't just a house; it was an archive of sensations, a museum of frozen moments. Marco moved, his bare feet sinking slightly into the tall garden grass. Every step awakened a memory. The rustle of the wind through the leaves carried the sound of children's laughter, his own, that of his cousins. The scent of damp earth reminded him of dirty hands after digging for imaginary treasures. It was an immersive experience, painfully vivid. And through his eyes, the landscape vibrated, almost breathing with him, showing cracks where arguments had occurred, lush blooms where love had abounded.

He entered the house. The long corridor, usually narrow, now stretched infinitely, the doors lining it appearing and vanishing like illusions. Each door was a threshold to a fragment of time. He chose one at random, a small dark wooden door, feeling an inner pull. Opening it, he found not a room, but a scene. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his knees barely clearing the edge, while his grandmother told him stories from distant times, in her sweet, raspy voice. The warmth of her hand on his, the scent of her old clothes: it was all there, so real that he reached out to touch her, but his hand passed through, like a wave through water. The scene vanished, leaving him with a burning longing, a nostalgia for what was forever lost.

He found himself back in the endless corridor. This time, the doors seemed to have an aura; some glowed with a warm light, others emanated a chilling cold. He approached a grey, worn door. From it filtered an echo of heated arguments, of slamming doors, the shrill sound of a quarrel he had always tried to forget, a moment that had crystallized a part of his childhood in fear and incomprehension. The temptation was to run away, to ignore that door, but the lesson from the previous chapter resonated: truth is fragmented, but whole. He couldn't ignore the shadows of his memory, for they too had shaped him. He opened the door, and the pain of that memory enveloped him, a wave of bitterness, of powerlessness. But this time, instead of fleeing, he stayed. He observed the scene, not as a terrified participant, but as a detached observer. The memory did not vanish, but its grip loosened. The pain did not disappear, but became manageable, part of the great tapestry of his identity.

Outside the door, the corridor was no longer infinite. The house walls had straightened, the windows had regained their normal size. The garden had become a more ordered, less wild place, and the swing was no longer rusty. It was a pacified image of memory, one that had accepted its scars and its joys. Marco understood. It was not about erasing the past, but about comprehending it, integrating it into the present. His identity was not a monolithic block, but a complex weaving of every lived moment, every person encountered, every joy and every sorrow.

A sense of peace, fragile but real, permeated him. The journey through the labyrinth of memory had led him not to an end, but to a new beginning. He had collected fragments of himself, some bright, others dark, and had stitched them together, not to recreate what had been, but to build what would be. The air around him began to shimmer, the outlines of the house to blur, a sign that the next layer of the dream, and of his soul, awaited him. The past had been visited, understood. Now it was the turn of the future, and the search for a deeper meaning.

Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

Mirrors and Reflections ~ Specchi e Riflessi

The whirlwind of mirrors and floating islands subsided with the same abrupt intensity with which it had begun, leaving Marco in a place that was, in some ways, even more disorienting than the salt desert or the unknown constellations. There was no longer the open vastness, nor the dense silence. It was an immense hall with glossy obsidian walls that reflected infinitely, creating a dizzying array of self and non-self. Every surface was a perfect mirror, multiplying his figure into hundreds, thousands of Marcos, extending into a horizon of ever-smaller, ever-more distorted reflections. The air was cold, sharp, and a faint hum, like that of an ancient projector, filled the space, a sound that seemed to emanate from every reflection and from none in particular. In the center of this dizzying cathedral of mirrors, a cubic podium, black and smooth like night marble, awaited.

His gaze fell upon one of the closer reflections, then another, searching for a point of reference, a confirmation of his own presence. But each image was both the same and different, an echo of an echo. The feeling of being fragmented, already present in his "real" life, amplified here, in this dreamlike space that seemed to want to disintegrate and reassemble him at the same time. The hum grew sharper, almost a hiss.

"It's you, after all."

The voice. It was his own, unmistakably, but strangely amplified, filtered by a metallic echo that made it unrecognizable and unsettling. It wasn't a sound escaping a throat, but a thought materializing in the air, resonating from the obsidian walls like a verdict. Marco spun around, his heart pounding wildly against his ribs, a deafening drum in the amplified silence of the hall.

From one of the infinite reflections, the one directly in front of him, the figure emerged. It didn't materialize, it didn't walk out of the mirror. It simply was. It was Marco himself, but not entirely. His shoulders were more hunched, his gaze more lost, a persistent shadow on his face that was not made of light or dark, but of weariness and resignation. His clothes, so similar to what he wore, seemed more crumpled, their colors more faded. It was like looking at an old photograph of himself, but one that revealed not what he had been, but what he could have been if he had surrendered to every doubt, every uncertainty, every compromise. It was the version of himself he had always tried to keep at bay, the part that whispered "don't make it," "let it go," "it's easier this way."

"Who are you?" Marco's voice was a whisper in that vast hall, a fragile sound lost among the infinite reflections.

The figure smiled, a smile that didn't reach its eyes, an expression of bitter understanding. "I am what you hide. What you fear to face when daylight fades and you're left alone with your thoughts. I am the weight of expectations not your own, the fear of failure, the comfort of mediocrity." It approached, and with each step, the reflections danced, multiplying its presence, making it difficult to distinguish the real from the duplicate. Every reflected Marco seemed to nod at its words, a silent legion of consent. "I am your laziness, your fear of judgment, your desire to disappear into the masses, to not stand out, to not fly." The last word resonated with a sharp irony, a bitter echo of the series' own title.

Marco felt a wave of repulsion so strong it took his breath away, but also a strange, painful familiarity. That figure was a part of him, a shadow he had always known existed, an invisible weight he had carried, but had never dared to face. It was his desire to conform, the seductive call of automatism he sought to fight. The obsidian hall seemed to tighten, the reflections became more pressing, surrounding him, forcing him into an unavoidable confrontation. The images of himself twisted, showing him moments of weakness, of surrender, of choices made out of inertia rather than will. There was no escape, not in this dream that was his very soul, his materialized unconscious.

The debate was no longer made of words. It was a clash of sensations, of inner pushes and pulls. A silent struggle between the part of Marco that wanted to give up and the part that, though wounded and tired, still yearned for freedom, for heteronomy. He felt the weight of years of external beliefs, of ingrained fears, of beaten paths that had led him away from his true essence. Every reflection seemed to judge him, but also to understand him. The figure, his shadow, was not an enemy to be defeated by force, but a part of himself to be recognized, to be integrated, from which to learn.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the figure dissolved. It didn't vanish into thin air, nor did it retreat into the mirrors with an abrupt gesture. It melted, like mist in the sun, not disappearing entirely, but retreating into the mirrors, becoming one reflection among many, less distinct, less imposing. It left behind a trail of bitter, yet necessary, awareness. Marco was alone again in the center of the hall, but he was not the same. The obsidian walls seemed less menacing now, the reflections less alienating. He had faced his shadow, and although he hadn't defeated it with violence, he had recognized it. He had seen the part of himself that pulled him down, towards massification, and he had chosen not to yield. And in that recognition, in that conscious choice, there was a first, faint spark of freedom. The journey had become heavier, more painful, but also more authentic, closer to the true essence of his Self. The obsidian hall, with its infinite reflections, was no longer a prison, but a vast archive of possibilities.

 Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

Symbols and Archetypes ~ Simboli e Archetipi

When Marco opened his eyes, the familiar grey of his room had been swallowed. There was no ceiling, no walls, just an immense expanse of what appeared to be a salt desert, shimmering under a milky light that emanated from no visible sun. The silence was absolute, so dense it almost felt like a sound, a deep hum vibrating in his bones. Every grain of salt beneath his bare feet was a tiny crystal of time, and he stood there, at the center of a white eternity.

A distant echo, like a forgotten song, drew him in. It wasn't a physical direction, but an inner call making its way through the silence. He began to walk, and with each step, the landscape shifted. The salt transformed into dark sand, then into a carpet of fluorescent moss. Above him, the milky sky cracked, revealing glimpses of a deep cobalt blue, dotted with constellations that belonged to no known star map.

From the cracks in the ground, forms emerged. They were neither trees nor buildings, but organic and geometric structures combined, pulsating with their own light. One of them, imposing and spiral-shaped, seemed made of broken mirrors, each reflecting a different fragment of his face: a childhood smile, a look of fear, an expression of unvented anger. It was like looking at a soul's photo album, endlessly disassembled and reassembled. Marco approached, an irresistible attraction urging him to touch those surfaces, to piece together his own reflection.

A shadow stirred at the edge of his vision. It wasn't menacing, but imposing. A tall figure, cloaked in shifting shadows, stood silhouetted against the cobalt sky. Its face was indistinct, but its eyes, two pools of ancient light, gazed at him with a wisdom that transcended time. The figure did not speak, but a voice resonated in Marco's mind, not with words, but with a wave of primordial understanding: "Seek what has been hidden. Your truth is fragmented, but whole."

The landscape around him began to swirl, the moss islands detached from the ground, the mirrors multiplied, reflecting not only his face but also fleeting scenes, blurred memories, unexpressed desires. Marco felt his Self expand, contract, as if he were breathing with the universe itself. This was not just a place; it was his own psyche, a labyrinth of symbols waiting to be deciphered. The journey had just begun, and already his identity was revealing itself, one fragment at a time.

 Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.

The Spark of the Dream ~ L' Innesco del Sogno

 The ticking of the digital clock on the desk was a constant note, an almost hypnotic hum that marked a time that never quite felt his own. The air in the small study was still, thick with the scent of printed paper and cold coffee. Outside, the world continued its frantic rush, an indistinct chorus of honking and voices barely filtering through the windows. Marco, the Self in question, felt that same frenzy, but inside him, it was an emptiness, an echo.

His eyes slid from the page of the book – an essay on the fragmentation of identity in the post-modern era – to the window, where the grey sky promised impending rain. Every day, the same routine, the same thoughts chasing each other in circles. "Is this me?" he wondered, but the question was faded, almost rhetorical. There was no answer he could grasp, only a sense of drift that accompanied him like a faithful shadow.

It was a wave. Not a sound, not a vision, but a sensation. A surge of familiar unfamiliarity, like a forgotten scent emerging from an old trunk. He detached himself from the chair, almost unwillingly, and approached the window. The reflection on the glass wasn't entirely his. Or rather, it was his, but distorted, as if the image were trembling under an invisible film of water. The city beyond the glass liquefied, its outlines softened, its colors merging into a dreamlike palette.

A shiver ran down his spine, not from cold, but from an unexpected, almost forbidden excitement. The ticking of the clock grew distant, the voices from the street faded. The real world was receding, making way for a stage that, though unknown, felt strangely his own. The edges of reality became fluid, porous. The air grew denser, brighter, and a silent, primal call invited him to cross that invisible threshold. Marco closed his eyes, feeling the weight of daily life slip away, and when he reopened them, the grey of his room had vanished. The journey had begun.

 Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.

Luca.