It was Thursday, one of those days that has no personality. They are not beginnings, nor ends, just a yawn. I was running away, I don't know what, my life was in danger, it was complicated enough by being in love with her and by carrying a rude flu that wouldn't let the normal temperature settle. During my escape, I entered a tunnel, and when the light disappeared, I noticed a train approaching. He couldn't hit me from the wall and let the train pass; everything was very narrow. I decided to run to the exit, but something told me that I would not make it. He would die. Just ten meters from the exit, he caught up with me. He ran over me, cutting up my body. I felt everything. It was horrible.

That was what I said in a "live” on the social network where I had more followers, just before I passed out.

I would have loved to say that that was my last lucid thought, a poetic farewell, a final act worthy of someone who always dreamed of being a great actor. But no. I survived. With all my organs distributed more like anecdotes than like vital systems, but breathing. I woke up in the hospital with tubes coming out of me, I was an octopus in reverse, and in front of the bed, a nurse who smelled of disinfectant.

"He says he was hit by a train—" I heard him say to a haggard-faced doctor, as if he had just read Kafka out loud and hadn't understood anything.

The doctor let out a short laugh. It felt like the punch line of a cold coffee conversation.

That's when I understood: they didn't believe me.

Since then, every day has been a continuous essay on how to look sane while the universe insists that everything is absurd. Like that love. She... the cause of my fever, literally and metaphorically speaking. She had that kind of beauty that you can't look straight at without risking amnesia. But he also had a voice that, for some reason, sounded identical to a subtle threat. I fell in love. Even worse, I told her that I fell in love.

Two days later, I began to see absent shadows of bodies, whispers that did not fit in mouths. And then, the escape. That absurd race that ended in the tunnel, with the train, with the tragic live broadcast. I became a puzzle that medical science put together out of defiance. Or by chance.

The ironic epilogue was to learn that no train had passed through there that night. None. The tunnel from Paradise to the Cemetery had been closed for years. I, however, had marks on my body that replicated the steel wheels like a tattoo left by death that he regretted at the last minute.

The psychologists said a lot of things. Dissociative disorder, feverish delirium, and even epilepsy were hinted at to me. No one wanted to talk about "her." Every time I mentioned her name, the spotlight would flash, the nurse would leave, and the clock would stop for five seconds. Exactly. Always five. By any chance? Maybe. But since then, I don't believe in coincidences, and I hate Thursdays.

Today I walk carefully not to look at reflections. I avoid tunnels, even if I get paid to cross them. Love is still there, in some slimy corner of memory, like a smoker's cough. And the flu, too. That rude flu, like a resentful mother-in-law moving into your chest. He didn't leave. It just became a part of me. Like the train. Like her.

And yes, I still feel everything. It's horrible.