(revised on Medium) On a tear off calendar (series: notes to myself)
We live as if we added time to our existence. Days pile up, like read books. Age increases, like memories. Years accumulate, like old photographs yellowing in an album. The journey accrues special moments, like points in some loyalty card. Not knowing the end, we consider only the beginning, and we start counting from there. Like using a digital calendar that has as many days as you need, our time as boundless as the natural numbers, plus one being the rule. But I remember that in our old house, in the small village, in the countryside, when celebrating the end of the year, we used to get a daily, tear off calendar. It was a free gift from a local shop. Days did not pile up, you tore them off, once a day, every day, until only the 31st of December was left, a lonely square of white paper, the date written in red, large and bold, deprived of all its dead siblings, already thrown into the dustbin. Going back to that house months later, you had to cut off a whole block, months were gone, ...