It’s opening and closing its mouth, like fish do. Not a sound, just opening and closing its mouth, and looking at me, staring.
And I never know whether it is looking from inside a tank, or whether we are in open sea, but no, I can somehow distinguish… I feel… I know that there is a glass between us, the way you just “know” stuff when you are dreaming.
The fish is there, staring at me, opening and closing its mouth and maybe it is looking at me from inside a fish tank or maybe I am inside a tank and it is looking at me from the outside, which would mean that I AM inside the water, maybe drowning, maybe pulled down by an invisible force, but before I can explore any further the thought of myself drowning in front of a staring fish, I wake up, as I always do.
No, I am not scared or agitated, the fish doesn’t even enter in the list of my recurring nightmares which are:
Number one: someone is trying to kill me with a huge knife and I do not have a place where to hide;
Number two: someone is running after me to kill me and I am unable to move my legs;
Number three: someone is looking for me, to kill me, I am hiding under a table and I see the killer approaching and I know it is a question of moments and he’ll discover and kill me.
These are the three main nightmare plots that have been haunting me for as long as I can remember (although lately only rarely): same plot, with few variations.
When I was very little the killers were often Turks or Nazis (too many black and white war movies when I was a child); another version is the one in which the killer is a lion, same dynamics: it is coming to get me and I either cannot move or cannot hide and I know that it’s a matter of seconds until it will find me.
Sometimes these nightmares were so vivid that I remember waking up very early in the morning and being unable to go back to sleep.
I remember being so terrified that nothing helped calming me down and I had to get dressed and go outside into the street because I was absolutely positive that me telling myself “switch on the radio, you’ll feel better” was itself part of my dream that I was still part of, basically I was convinced that I was still dreaming and that I was trying to calm myself from within the dream.
We can agree that a fish staring at me hardly registers as a nightmare, can’t we? The fish is maybe just because of all those Bojeck Horseman episodes that I have been watching lately…
So, this morning, very early in the morning, or at night (I’m never sure how to put this), I saw a fish. I was still half asleep but I know that I had the strong feeling that I had to remember the dream in the morning, because I knew that it was important, and as words came to my mind, I tried to resist them because I know all too well that unless I write them down immediately…
I have a rule: never think of anything interesting in bed while half asleep, unless you can write it down, because in the darkness of the night words have a way to envelope and combine and you know that the best words will come to you in the moment that you are drifting away in no one’s land, and in the morning you’ll have the feeling of having forgotten something important.
Did I disobey my rule last night? Why do I have that fish in my mind?
For many years I’ve only eaten fish, not meat. In fact, if I were to calculate it, I spent more years of my life as a pescatarian then eating meat.
I only started eating meat again at one of Adis’ parties, when we all already knew that he was sick - but before knowing that he was terminal, actually just a matter of months. Immediately before that, and really, each party at Adis was a celebration of life and joy, and I think no one believed that he was going to die, not even when he moved to the country and had to carry his intestine to the outside, in a bag, with those farting noises, and we pretended that it was nothing, and gee were we all happy when he spent a fortune to buy himself a professional camera, because it meant that he believed he had a future, enough future to invest in an expensive camera, and we wanted so much that he had a future.
So, yes, it was at one of those parties that I started eating meat again, it was a piece of sausage, I hadn’t eaten meat for how long… 30 years? Yes it’s about right, but I wanted to tell you about the fish: a big, wet, grey fish that is looking at me, moving its mouth, open and close, like fish to.
Its grey, wet skin is not like… real, but it is almost cartoonish (yes, this must have to do with me binge watching Bojack Horseman). A huge fish, grey and wet that looks at me in the dark of the night… and another movie comes to mind, a short animation I bumped into late at night, in one of those collection of animations that they used to broadcast late at night in summer, or maybe not, maybe I watched it at the cinema, the best animations from all over the world, I don’t know, I don’t remember, but I know that every now and then the short movie comes to my mind, and I have told and retold the plot so many times at dinner parties for effect.
It goes like this: it is night in a small village, somewhere north, it is cold, the weather is miserable; the fishermen are getting ready to go out to the sea on their tiny boats, they kiss their wives and kids goodbye and leave their poorly lit, poorly heated huts, disappearing into the night, into the storm and into the raging waves.
Imagine a very dark pallet of colours, blacks, browns and greys. After the Fishermen leave on their boats, the wives lock the doors and go back inside, to prepare for the night. And then, in the middle of the night, as they are sleeping with their children, huge fish come out from the sea, they are black, wet and shiny, they walk by standing on their tales, and carry huge, butchers’ knives, and we see how they, an army of them, proceed in entering the Fishermen’s homes and to slaughter everybody, we see the children screaming and trying to hide under the bed but the fish pull them out and use the knives to cut their throats and all the while we think that this is terrible but that the fishermen are slaughtering the fishes families out at sea. And when the slaughter ends, when also the last child has been butchered, when also the last scream has echoed away, the fish, holding the knives still dripping from blood, march back to the shore and jump into the water, just in time for the first light of the day to appear, together with the boats of the fishermen heavy with the catch of the day, their tiny boats full of fish, jumping still alive. The end.

I have tried many times to find out the title or something. I wouldn’t mind watching it again to see whether it is really as terrible as I remember.
So, the fish, last night, a fish that woke me up and that I have decided, for no apparent reason, to place at the center of my tale. I wish I had some context to give you, to help you understand what it is about, but I am myself at loss when interpreting this image, maybe it comes from the months we spent in lockdown, trapped inside our homes searching for a meaning where they were just orders to obey: do not go out, wash your hands, sanitise, cough inside your elbow, wear a mask, print a permit so you can go shopping, wash your hands, sanitise…
My dreams were awfully vivid during lockdown, and day and night seemed to converge and to merge, in a seamless mashed time. Mind you, I did try to keep track of times of the day and so, but came the time to go to bed, I was never tired, sleepy yes but never tired – or maybe, was it the opposite, always tired but never sleepy?
You see? It feels already like I have forgotten what it was like during lockdown. Gone, removed.
There was that “yeah” effect of freedom, the first day after lockdown
Oh yes, I remember how I run along the beach on the 4th of May, early in the morning, we were all still unsure, wearing masks even while running, back then, because no one knew, back then and yet, I know that despite the sense of oppression and despair, I was also a bit sad when the lockdown was over, I don’t know, there was something heroic in taking the shopping to my mum who couldn’t go out, and there was something magic and enchanted in walking through empty street, always fearful something might happen, will I be stopped by the police to be questioned? Will they ask to see whether I am carrying a self-printed permit? Will they believe that I’m taking the shopping to my mum? Will they call her to check my story?
It was a bit like when I went to East Berlin, before the wall came down, never sure whether they were going to stop you for a crime you didn’t know you had committed, for rules you did not know you had broken.
You see? I am doing it again. Changing subject from what I had decided that THIS was going to be about. But I cannot avoid it. As more horrible news arrive from the other side of the world, Australia, where my friends are trapped by yet another lockdown (this time harsher, stricter, with an actual curfew) as horrible thoughts, warning signs remind me that lockdown is just a breath away, pun intended, my thoughts continue to draw circles, visiting my dreams, like huge, menacing, grey wet fish, waiting for me to fall asleep so that they can get me in. my sleep.