Mainland

He left on a day whose memory is lost in an afternoon 24 years ago (a distant day that remains an instant), he crossed the Alps by car and stopped in France. He began to drive from city to city in an increasingly frenetic way, as if the centrifugal force of the movement was able to push away the "bad thoughts": the states of depersonalization and derealization that undermined his consciousness. France, Spain, then again, France, Italy.

In a permanent altered state of consciousness that, as Lapassade writes, "is a new and temporary system with its own unique properties, a restructuring of consciousness that makes this state experience as a change" during which the person has the impression of "a certain deregulation of the habitual functioning of his consciousness and of living another relationship with the world, with himself, with his body, with his identity". A state that led him to accumulate fines, reports, violations of all kinds until they confiscated his car. He buys another one that irremediably breaks down, he moves to live in a camper under the house where he was born in the southern outskirts of Turin. More fines arrive, reports: he leaves the camper and goes to the stations going to sleep at every stop along all the lines that left the one company town after 10 pm: Mompantero, Susa, Beaulard, Chiomonte, Salbertrand, Ivrea, Alba, Asti, Santhià, then a few nights at his mother's house. In the meantime, the voices arrive telling him where to go, which road to change while on the kitchen table of his mother's house uninterrupted layers of fines piled up: 10 thousand euros, then 20 thousand, 50 thousand. At the same time he accumulated visits in all the Emergency Rooms of Piedmont, Liguria and Lombardy, but when the time came for the visit he would walk away because the doctor would tell him "you're fine".

An unstable flow, but with its own balance, until one day it got upset with people who he thought were bothering him, he was reported, convicted, banned by the judge, he saw his dearest brother in tears and in those salty drops he discovered that only shipwreck makes you find a new mainland. On November 29, 2024 at 10:05 in Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Turin Paolo returned home. It could have happened. It had to happen. We don't know if it will happen again, but today is a celebration.

Fabrizio Floris
NP January 2025