When a man vanishes

What do you think when a man leaves your world? He died or he went to another place. It’s not like yours. He stepped out of the shower and then he was in the other place.  You sit and you wonder about it. You wonder how he is.  You wait for him to come or to call.  He does not. Then you know he is never coming back.  You sit and you touch your face and you try to understand where he went.


How is it that he is not there? He was there and now he is gone. The body lies somewhere. It is in a bathroom or on some stairs or on the road to the supermarket. Maybe he made it to the supermarket.  Maybe he bought a loaf of bread.  And then walked home and bit into the hot crust, crunching, looked into the sky and around himself and was glad. Or maybe, just thought of something. The day was ending quietly and it was still and shining. Then they found him. He had fallen from a roof. Who knows when we find out that we are dead?


Who knows it first?  The dead man or the people around him?  They look at him and they frown. They feel for a pulse. They check the breath.  Maybe he is drunk or his heart failed?  Or what if he is homeless. No one knows.  They stand in the dark or in the sun.


The ambulance comes and people crowd around, or maybe no one comes and the man lies there alone. But he is at his door. He cannot fit the key into the lock because he is holding the bread with one hand.  We do not know if he is amused by it or sad.


We only see the body, not the death waiting in the air or the water or the bushes, nor the immensity of life gliding past. Sometimes you do not even see the body. You only hear that he is no more. Finished. And then we relate to that differently. But he, maybe, already decided to go to sleep early because of work tomorrow.  And no one tells him that he is over. There, on the road. Vanishing from our world. For him, everything is as it was. The details do not matter.  The main thing is that he is alive! But for us — he’s not. Who knows where we are, and where he is? You leave like that and you wonder if you were ever there at all. There is no one to ask.