A modern person

Here is a modern person.

He seeks to feel virtuous without the commensurate effort, without having to make a monetary, emotional, or physical transaction.

He finally decides to sign a petition, to click that redeems and edifies with its digital weightlessness.

Virtue is an email confirmation away, just a few seconds in that agile realm that announces itself with the promise of real time, always squeezing the counter to reach the pure now, the immediacy that is swallowed like a hamburger in one bite, with the gluttony of fast food that was the first herald of this progress with its tongue hanging out.

The email doesn't arrive, and virtue begins to fade, with the bad taste in his mouth of the already-supposed victory that turns into defeat, of the goal disallowed in the last minute.

A timid breath before giving up puts him on the trail of the dark forces that in the shadows may be stealing his moral impulse: "If you don't get the email, check your spam folder." He peers into that tray, like a well of blind waters, and discovers a quagmire like life itself.

A sort of abandoned home with all the memories mixed together, the meager and the jumbled waste, but at the same time everything well arranged and ordered.

A form that seems to deceive the eye and thus deceive judgment.

A Goldilocks has entered his house and tried all the meals, the armchairs, and the beds.

Everything has the air of a galleon sunk in the depths of the sea, where some treasures still retain a dull glimmer in the rapture of the seaweed and the vegetables of the underworld.

He rescues from there emails from people whose silence once puzzled him, and then the routines and meekness of habits he relegated into oblivion, only to mutate into shadows and then into nothing.

A love could be wasted in that dump of commercial messages, payment notices, miracle recipes, and frauds dressed in suits of cordiality and prestige.

A castaway's bottle whose message only makes sense when there's another shore.

At this point, that virtuous impulse has been extinguished.

The suspicion of living with Goldilocks makes him feel that what's intimate has become public, secrets could be unveiled, refuges, lairs, hiding places, nooks, and crannies revealed.

Rather than sign, empty.

The trash can icon appears like a god who exonerates without asking for explanations.

A simple click removes the plug and sends it into nothingness, into a digital drain now safe because it can't be visited, that cursed swamp.