Dear comadre:

Today I am writing to you with my mind a jumble of mushrooms. I do not know what to feel, think or decide. Something happened to me that, at least in first written request, was supernatural. I want to believe it was, although perhaps it is misleading to use that word. What I am trying to say is that a prophecy was fulfilled.

In my room, a woman's room, I received the dagger of news: my brother had been missing for more than five hours. I remembered segments of the conversation from the previous day's call, when I said, "What my brother needs is a lesson."

I did not understand my mother's words very well; she stammered in agonizing whispers. She hung up on me without further information. For two hours I stared at every piece of my hair. Finally, a slap of reality jolted me.

Then my mother dialed again: he had appeared. The young man, my brother, got a few drops in his drink. With his head lost and hollowed out, he got into a cab, not an Uber. The driver, between outrages and threats, tried to kidnap him. That event, a routine nightmare of every Mexican, touched my other shoulder, my brother, with whom I learned to be me.

He barely remembered what happened, of those moral crudities that don't let you close your eyes because of the black lagoon of the report. I crinkled my eyes, full of fear. Two days have passed and I can't stop imagining the scenario. During this time I found, among my writings, a poem from the day of the kidnapping.

I froze as I read it, listening to my own colloquial sentiment. Words I didn't even remember writing. As Cortázar used to say, there is a superior force that possesses you when you write. I am one of those people; although of course, the difference is that there are those who do it well. He, undoubtedly, had a superior force of thought, of existential doubt, of different desires.

But well, this letter is not to ramble on about another writer. This poem was an impulsive creation, born from the feeling of being pursued by a figure, by a being who wanted to crush me with his big foot.

The poem is as follows:

Fleeing

Ants by the hairs of my ankles,
With every step I see them.
Those who come and go for me.
They are several because it's never one.
as for every girl or woman.
A destiny for them,
For rare, unpublished!
Run, they'll catch up with you.
Wake up or tell them to stop eating.
-To them, the ants.
Shake, then, if they don't get up.
They'll carry me off with their big feet.
Just take me to my blanket.
Take me to my elephant mat.
Where I don't need the bugs.

The shrill voice of a sentence comes home to me: "You never understand what you write". No, indeed, but it is because loneliness has consumed my syntax, a loneliness without cohesion. The images I capture can only be understood from childhood, and even then, not even those who were there at the time can decipher the symbols.

But you, dear friend, read me with the cricket of conscience. You lodge in the snout of the whale of my words. That is why I write to you.

As you know, the poem tells of a person who is running. I don't want to tell you, woman, because in that country everyone is killed. However, the poem does tell of a woman. A girl who can't move because of how heavy her legs are, ants being the ones carrying that weight. So small, carrying so much.

And you may ask yourself, now what reference letter or symbol did you relate it to? Well, the music one, while I was listening to the song "Thank you" by Ed Maverick:

"If one day I die, I wouldn't want them to miss me if they didn't love me yesterday."

I don't want to, but I'd like to know.

"I wouldn't want them to do it if it wasn't yesterday."

I was, for a moment, driven to write with that combination of words as if my death had been the result of a kidnapping. And, as you know, I am that person who creates realities in her head. Well, I didn't want them to miss me if something happened to me at that moment, if they hadn't loved me yesterday.

Of course I misrepresented the status as a robbery, but I wanted to put myself in the place of a death beyond my control, like a kidnapping. Imagining my own death, I felt what it would be like to be running, how it would be impossible to move. Something in me, or an external force, would stop me.

And, while I was immersed in that feeling, the same thing was happening to my brother. On another continent, in the early morning, while I lived by day. A greater force had possessed him; he was fragile, stripped of his will by the drops they had put in his drink. He could not run. He could not react. Inside that cab, he struggled with what little consciousness he had left, trying to calculate whether he should throw himself into the avenue, how to survive, how to decide.

Strange, isn't it? At least at that moment, it all felt like a prediction. The events were unrelated, but at the same time they seemed to be connected in a way that was impossible to ignore. I calculated the time with my brother. I did the math, tried to find the exact coincidence.

At first I thought that I had manifested that it would happen. That idea slapped me in the face with its incoherence. It was my ego talking. I shut it up and began to investigate. I opted for a theory: Jung's theory of synchronicities. In his Synchronicity book, he relates events like the Hopkins story, the book that returned to his hands, or the photograph of the boy that returned to the girl's hands. Coincidences with objects, circumstances that seem almost macabre and unreal.

Jung states that there are no coincidences, but there are causalities. In his words:

"It is rather a matter of occurrence together in time, that is to say, of a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality, I have adopted the term "synchronicity" to designate a hypothetical factor with a rank similar to that of causality as a principle of explanation".

What this means is that Jung is based on three main branches:

First, the idea of Hippocrates, which holds that the universal principle is present even in the smallest particle.

Second, the theory of Philo of Alexandria, which posits man as a microcosm.

And third, the I Ching, which uses methods to understand a status in its entirety, placing the details against a cosmic background.

The book also mentions his special relationship with Einstein and the theory of relativity. Jung thought about the possibility of a greater and more complete consciousness, a "dream" unknowable to us. He speaks of meaningful connections or juxtapositions and improbable chance concurrence, with numbers reaching astronomical figures. To which Einstein, for his part, spoke to Jung, of the relativity of time and space, and of their psychic conditionality. Both reflected on the idea that these apparently inexplicable coincidences point to something mysterious and transcendental.

You may wonder what all these topics have to do with what happened in the poem. Why did I have a maniacal obsession with this topic? Well, because the connection between what I was writing and what was happening to my brother did not occur with precision in time, but in a kind of sensory prophecy, of an event, of that sensation of being persecuted. I used symbols, such as ants, which are perhaps an archetype that I do not want to unravel. Jung emphasizes these symbols in the explanation of the examples of synchronicity.

I don't have any answers, I don't know what this event wants to tell me. And I am afraid to look for more information. I am afraid of wasting my time on something that might not make sense. This synchronicity, which must comply with the principle of an unconscious symbol that reaches consciousness and coincides with an objective status , is it really a significant phenomenon or a mere synchronism, as Jung calls it? A banality, an eye where it is not.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence without relevance. But, like these authors, I try to explain something almost cosmic with a language that always feels insufficient.

Now I wait for your answer, because I know you will answer from another chair that is not mine. Maybe you will help me not to wish or think as I did in this other poem.

Feet in all directions

Today, amidst the mist of feet I thought I knew,
amidst the white veil that doesn't let me see who it is.
In every corner I run into the reflection.
of what is and is not,
of what is not seen and is very much seen,
of what was not touched and what was touched.
There is a shadow in the folds of yesterday's reflection.