In the cosmos

The blue supergiant Rigel, in the constellation Orion.

Voices could be heard from the hospital corridor. Around the bed of a terminally ill his friends we discussed politics. The passionate arguments about socialism, freedom, communism, independence and fascism ran from one side to the other over the bloodless face of the dying man. This ideological altercation had been provoked by the profane insults that at that moment the politicians were inferring on the television hanging on the wall. In the middle of the discussion, someone asked the patient for his opinion. With his last breath, barely voiceless, he murmured: "Tomorrow I'll be already in the cosmos, I don't know what this shit will look like from the stars." That said, hours later, he fell into a coma and passed away the next day. After a few years, in the Atacama desert, an astronomer used a laser beam flashlight to explain the great cosmic party that takes place at night in the sky. Billions of stars spread over my head like a nourishing soup of halogen lights at my fingertips. As the astronomer pointed to the Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds, which are constellation factories, in the silence of the desert I thought that up there, perhaps, my friend without any opinion would be part of the starry sky. That night in Atacama, at the end of the overwhelming vision of the cosmos, the astronomer stopped pointing the laser beam at the stars and illuminated the garden floor to guide my steps in the dark. "Be careful with that hole, don't break your neck," he warned me. In this case the black hole that could absorb me was not in the galaxies, but in the miserable earth that my shoes were now walking on. If I decided to explore it, I would find it full of millstones that have forced me to take communion and of all the dead friends along with so many buried dreams.