THE MAN INSIDE

2024

Scary

I dreamed that a man was driving my body.
It wasn’t me who decided, it wasn’t me who walked, it wasn’t me who spoke.
I only floated to one side, watching everything in third person, as if life had turned into a silent movie where I was merely a spectator.

The man forced me to move.
He forced me to smile with a mouth that was no longer mine, to say words I didn’t recognize, to touch things that felt foreign.
I was far away, very far away, as if I lived inside an endless cold shower, while an orange lamp flickered above me.
That glow burned more than the cold: it was the light of a prison that couldn’t be switched off.
I saw my body naked, trembling, numb from the cold, and I couldn’t return to inhabit it.

The man lived my days as if they were his.
At night he filled the room with grotesque noises, hollow moans, senseless laughter.
He slept with many people, but it was all false: clumsy movements, exaggerated breaths,
as if he wanted to convince someone that he was alive.
I watched from the corner, unable to close my eyes, unable to look away.
Pleasure turned into noise.
Noise into hatred.
And I into nothing.

Time passed the way it does in dreams: without logic, without measure.
I saw him age suddenly, as if an eternity had gone by in a single blink.
First his hair went gray, then wrinkles, then his hair started falling out in clumps.
I saw him fall asleep on the couch, mouth open like a tired animal,
drop the remote and wake with a start at the sound.
Each scene was absurd and repetitive, like a play performed only for me.

The man pretended to have two faces.
Outside he was kind, almost servile, with a smile painted on by force, like a carnival mask.
But inside the house, when no one watched, he became someone else: dark, furious, heavy with silence.
That duality was unbearable.
It was like watching an actor forget his role, repeating meaningless lines.

In the dream, one day he got up after breakfast and went outside.
He walked awkwardly, as if his legs were made of wood.
While waiting for the bus, he suddenly collapsed, falling like a puppet with cut strings.
Next I saw him open his eyes on a white stretcher, surrounded by tubes and machines that breathed for him.
No time passed; I only watched him wither more and more, until at last his soul, which had never been mine. Left the body.

In that instant I woke inside the dream.
I felt the invisible chains break, the icy water vanish, the orange lamp finally go out.
For the first time in years I breathed deeply.
For the first time I had the illusion of being free.
But even in that moment, the question pierced me like a knife:
Will I be able to rest at last?

I remembered that my real life had ended long before, at fifteen.
I remembered the mistake of being kind to the wrong people.
I remembered the cold earth over my face, six feet under.
I had died young.
He corrupted me.
He forced me to keep living inside a skin that wasn’t mine.

Now that the old man is gone, I disappear too.
There is no triumph in this escape, only exhaustion.
Because my story didn’t begin with my death, but with the prison that came after.
And upon waking from this dream, I don’t know whether nothingness, silence, or a new captivity awaits me.