"I told you... It is unsettling, when you turn invisible" I whispered to an empty space close to my shopping basket.
Astra's amused voice replied from somewhere next to me: "And I told you that it would be way more unsettling for everyone to see you talking with an unnaturally small girl."
"You should have told me that dark matter people can become invisible at will. I wasn't ready to take you with me to buy stuff..."
Breathing behind my mask, I looked around me hoping that nobody had noticed my bizarre dialogue with the void. I tried to focus on the food, looking at the half empty shelves and feeling Astra bumping into my leg from time to time.
"Do you need to eat? I mean... your kind" I asked aloud, once in the street again. No answer. "Astra? Are you here?..." I looked around, my heartbeat increasing. I perfectly knew she was invisible, but I also knew she was not used to the dangers of a big city. Suddenly I realized how precious her company had become. "Astra!"
Her tiny hand pulled my jacket: "I'm here! Aw, you were worried? I am fine. I just found something interesting."
"Don't do it again" I sighed with relief. "Just don't."
"Look. Get some" she said. Behind the window she pointed to, I could see nothing but color spray cans.
"Astra, I told you... There are not strange hypercoloring competitions in this side of the universe, I am sorry. What are we supposed to do with those? Also, the shop is closed. Everything is closed, did you forget? Quarantine?..."
She appeared behind the window, all of a sudden, between the cans, smiling with her usual sass, under my astonished stare. Then she disappeared, and appeared again next to me, with two cans in her hands. "Astra! That's stealing. Someone could see you! And you usually get things with money around here. Haven't your people told you?"
"If you don't get these cans right now and leave a message of protest on a wall, you will definitely regret. The quarantine will end, everything will back to normality, and you will tell yourself that your time and the best part of you is wasted for nothing. Haven't I told you about the Messenger?..."
I shrugged. "This is getting too far, Astra. I am sorry our civilization is so disappointing to you, but if history taught me something, it is that writing some random generic leftist message on a wall does not change anything. And there is always something or someone overwhelming you and forcing you to a life you cannot live at its fullest. It has always been like that. There is always an upper floor you don't have access to. And now please, put them back."
I hoped my eyed did not look too severe from above the mask. She frowned, and replied: "That's exactly why nothing changes in this lazy planet! Basically you take everything for granted. You know what? Dark matter people managed to enjoy their life for one simple reason: they realized that history does not teach you anything specific!"
"Now you are just talking nonsense... Please put those back."
"This is not nonsense. Every time you mention stuff from the past, you claim it has some great importance. And in the end, even if more and more people study and memorize useless battles and have huge bookshelves in their houses, what does it change? Nothing. Everyone keeps complaining, and claims that knowing the past can help us not to make the same mistakes. But this is so stupid! Do you know what a mistake is? Are people happier while being told facts from the past?"
I just looked at her with indulgence, and stayed silent.
"A mistake is something making you regret of not fulfilling your personal projects and interest. The winners of the battles are the only ones deciding what a mistake is, and people just forget, and nothing improves. What you call civilization today was born from acts that someone else called mistakes, but now what? - seventy years passed, or one hundred, or whatever, and everyone does not deem that a mistake anymore. Someone who failed a very cruel attempt may be considered a loser or a lunatic by someone, but someone else will just learn how to make a better attempt against the former winners.
"Stop with this 'History taught us' rationale, stop it! It never worked, it does not work! People who were ten times more convinced than you, more learned, more clever and stronger than you tried to save humanity from being stupid, and look around you now: did it work? Did humanity learn how to recognize a mistake? Just do something now for your own life and your own people of today, not for the rest of the human history!"
I looked into her starry eyes, which shone for just a second with an orange meteor. I looked around me: few people went and backed from their shopping routine, enjoying the sun. How great that time was, how lucky humanity had been because of that quarantine. Of course just few people were able to call that a fortune, because most of them had not built a personal rich space like me, a room full of whatever I needed, a world made of thoughts and beauty and memories and video games.
The world was still too convinced it had to be convinced of something, and it was ready to sacrifice everything for a conviction - namely, it could not see that nothing mattered in the end, nothing but the beauty of the present moment. No, I didn't need to back to normal. Normal was not enough anymore. Normality was destroying everything, normality was the problem.
I gently took the two cans from my tiny angry friend, and realized that I was to do something for myself, for the very first time. I sighed, and said: "We need a plan." Astra disappeared again after a shimmering smile of hers. Nothing would have been normal again.
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from Short Stories
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