TABULA

I can no longer find the old Tabula where the entire itinerary that I had to travel from my arrival to my departure was described. If it really existed, I must have lost it when I was a child, when I inadvertently and unconsciously believed in free will and in the existence of mechanisms that would allow a swift and harsh retribution for bad actions and the perennial sweet rewards for good behavior.

The imaginary Tabula would be adorned with golden filigree, the handwritten letters by a refined and flagrantly baroque calligraphy, the brief periods, generic sentences derived from almost ethereal concepts, erected in such a way as to always fit the possible situations to come. Something like a prediction: '...and you will spend your tender age immersed in games and fantasies'. Further on, an imperious sentence: '...and then you will confront the innocuous dreams of puberty with the raw reality that maturity teaches'.

Comical, but there is an entire transcendental delirium embedded in the discovery and disclosure of this particular cosmogony, as if it were necessary to carefully, but urgently, unwrap this wrapping sealed by the imagination and, at the same time, try to safeguard the mystery of the egocentric liturgy contained in the pretended, lost, and illusory Tabula of Life.

Perhaps it is like the immense guilt we would have when we broke our grandmother's very rare vase, only to find out soon afterwards, looking at the shards scattered on the floor, amidst sadness, surprise, relief and disappointment, that the vase was, in the end, nothing more than one of the trinkets acquired by a sick hoarder.

The lost Tabula, inanimate and immaterial, must rest, inhabit or take refuge in a kind of virtual limbo in the recesses of the cerebellum, helping to keep body and mind in balance, acting simultaneously as a support and a walking stick. The generalizing sentences it contains fit in perfectly with the most significant moments of existence. A brief, laconic '...and you will know then that it is time for withdrawal and reflection', matches that painful, abrupt, and unexpected separation you may have suffered. A philosophical and grandiloquent statement: '...and with the overthrow of antagonisms, bonanza and prosperity will prevail' fits clearly with the happiness that comes after reaching that seemingly unattainable material goal.

But there is much more, because contained between the lines of the far-fetched words of an almost archaic language, entire periods that before seemed only underlying, almost imperceptible, stand out, everything demonstrating that the Tabula is not only what it explicitly contains, but a whole hidden encyclopedia of sayings, some of which are antagonistic, others preponderantly scrutinizing an unspeakable future, pointing out the intercurrence of relevant moments that have not yet occurred.

Prudence dictates that we take a cautious and frankly incredulous look at these, because from the heights of our protective ignorance, we prefer to believe that the portrait of tomorrow has not even been drawn. It is an inglorious and cowardly task, since finding that certain predictions of the past were right only makes those for the future logically and statistically plausible, and it is a matter of time before they actually occur.

I have never looked closely at the last sentences of the Tabula, except at a glance. Words like 'end', 'ultimate', 'terminal', which I quickly glimpsed, today are not able to inspire in me the desire to face them with the courage I supposed I had. Therefore, I keep catalogued in the category of the unknown what I could easily have verified as certainty. First because of the fear of not being able to shake off the threatening ghost that resides in the inevitability of bad times, then because it would have made no sense to stop being surprised, to stop enjoying and sometimes suffering from the imponderable results of all the things that are yet to come.

And maybe that's why, with the cleverness and lucidity that only a child could have, I decided at that initial moment of the journey, to choose to trust and insist on my own, and until then, incipient will, despising and hiding from myself the certainties and truths that might be contained in the Tabula.

Surely the path would have been infinitely less difficult and the surprises, good and bad, would have ceased to exist, as well as all the suffering here and there could have been easily avoided. However, it is easy to assume that I would never have experienced the strange warmth of shame running down my face when I made all the mistakes I did, just as I would never have tasted the metallic flavor of tears when disappointments and physical discomfort made me cry.

It would have been impossible to learn from the multiple falls along the way, with the fatigue when realizing that the shortcuts that seemed bright turned to ashes, with the crossroads that unexpectedly appeared and for a long time left me lost, to the point of falling into absolutely all the holes and trapdoors that swallowed me, these being the ones truly responsible for building the immature, incomplete, illogical, and ignorant being that I am to this day.

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