The Ballad of the Low Lifes by Enrico Remmert

Yes, of course I know the First Rule of Life: never stop and think for one moment. And yet there are times when you can't help but weigh things up: that's where I found myself at twenty-seven and, like Milo, I wasn't in any particular place, I hadn't chosen any particular road, I wasn't going in any particular direction. I wasn't going, period. I'd missed the starting gun, for crying out loud!

The worst thing, gentle readers, is that I realized this all of a sudden. Can you imagine? It was like when you're playing chess and suddenly your queen's taken. In one second you realize that the whole series of moves leading up to that point was wrong, but you can't go back: the match goes on, with your options reduced to practically zero.

And it's at that moment that Milo suddenly reappeared in my life after three years of rehab. I just found him next to me; like me, he was drifting, but unlike me, he had an irrepressible joie de vivre. It's his desire to be up to something, always and despite everything, that put me under his spell from the very beginning: his urge to come up with scheme after scheme, never completely legit, to make money; schemes that cancelled the future and put aside the questions, schemes to which he could dedicate all his thoughts, schemes that filled time and chased away fear…. It was he that got me going again, until I understood that even though you've lost the queen you can still play to the end, and your opponent-these are the rules of life-had better be careful not to make a false move: because you'll be there, waiting to cut him to pieces. Milo taught me all this: to play by my rules, to get something good out of everything, to try to laugh about it. He opened my eyes to the fact that in reality no real misfortune has ever touched us: we were not born into absolute poverty, we weren't set to sewing shoes or weaving carpets at the age of ten, we don't have any serious diseases, our part of town isn't full of anti-personnel mines, we don't live in the middle of a civil or religious war, it doesn't occur to us to sell a kidney to survive, we've never suffered from hunger or thirst. We're immensely fortunate and we can play the game of life by our rules. Play by our rules. Lose, but by our rules. He made me understand that living isn't a question but an answer, that you have to feel welcome in the world. He it was, gentle readers, who made me really understand how dazzling and miraculous it is, this reality ticking away from one second to the next.