A small passage from the book that i am writing and that will be published this year.

She sat beside me, Monica, her body relaxed but her heart tense, smiling faintly, perhaps out of a need to dispel the strangeness of the moment, perhaps because she simply did not know how else to react. She looked at me with her large eyes, warm and weary with astonishment, as though she were trying to create a new alphabet with which to read me. And I… I smiled and remained silent, even though something inside me was swaying, something beyond words, beyond this perfect present I had offered her like an illusion built of glass.

Because even though I had made her believe, even though I had materialized before her a bottle of French champagne and a gold bar as if they were mere trifles pulled from a magician’s bag, in my mind, in those depths untouched by everything I had become, a shadow had grown. Silent, yet deep.

A shadow with names. With voices. With a past.

Magda.

Diana.

Two lives which, once they crossed paths with mine, shattered, not like stories that end badly, but like fragile structures that were never built to withstand what I am. And what I am… is hard to put into simple words. A man? No. A god? Not even close. Something in between. Something that not even the mirror of the Thousand Truths of Iram could define without showing me a form that was hideous not only in the physical sense of the word, but even more in that other sense, the one you feel in your stomach when you realize that you are capable of destroying without meaning to.

Because I loved them. Both of them. And that was exactly what proved fatal for them.

Every time I tried to force time, to persuade it to spare them, every time I placed myself between them and what we call “fate,” I found myself facing an invisible resistance, yet an unconquerable one. Like a force greater than me, telling me: “This is as far as you are allowed to go.”

And then I understood. That some threads cannot be pulled twice. That some existences cannot survive the touch of a man like me.

So I chose, in an act of almost tender desperation, to erase their traces from my life. To go back and choose never to know them at all. Not because I did not love them, but precisely because I loved them more than they could bear.

Now Monica is here. Beside me. Happy, astonished, slightly dizzy from everything she has learned, but alive. Still whole.

And I wonder… how long will she remain that way?

Because no matter how deeply I can dive into the structure of matter, no matter how far I can travel through time and space, there is a blind spot, a corner of the universe I cannot conquer: the will of those ancient laws, the laws that not even the creators can twist without paying a price.