Every time I turn on my computer I feel a twinge in my phantom limb. For years I've had a photo of Monument Valley as my screensaver, and every morning, when I sit down to work, for a moment I think that straight road through the desert between Arizona and Utah is still right there where the screen shows it to me. For more than a year now it's been the fruit of my own personal hallucination.
It haunts me at every hour of the day and night and manifests itself in the most insidious and painful ways. A friend invites me to his graduation ceremony at Stanford and my first instinct is "I'm going!", then that same twinge reminds me that Stanford no longer exists, California no longer exists, and maybe my friend doesn't exist anymore either. It takes me a few minutes to come out of the hallucination — I breathe, stretch my legs, close my eyes, and focus on my new world.
But it isn't easy: my brain keeps the neurological (and geographical) map of the missing limb active, the nerves send signals even though they're no longer receiving stimuli, and the brain's plasticity completes the deception, making me believe in something that no longer exists.
A few days ago I was looking for a flight to Mexico — I was actually tempted by Canada too, a kind of double American surrogate — but the prices were really too high. Then suddenly Skyscanner flags a cheap flight. I was a step away from booking when I noticed it had a layover in Dallas. I fell for it again: first an itch, then a burning, then a sharp pain right there, where America used to be.
If only I could stop in Dallas and save a few hundred euros on the way to Mexico: that city Skyscanner shows me so enticingly isn't there, it's just the deceptive memory of an extinct habit. I try to take an aspirin but I know it won't be enough.
America was amputated from me on January 20, 2025, but I still feel it in its place. Truth be told, as early as 2017 something had started going wrong. Strange pains in the night, tingling. I began to worry when I had trouble moving it: it slipped out of my control, hid from me, reared up, made strange noises. I told myself: "surely this isn't a stroke?" Then I felt somewhat better for a few years, I thought it was all resolved — but no. Since last January everything has started up again at a harrowing level. I've seen various specialists, had every kind of test done, but in the end the prognosis was grim: amputation was unavoidable.
I couldn't believe it — I kept telling everyone: there has to be another solution, how do I live without America, it's a part of me, I can't give it up. But in the end I had to give in: cut clean and precise and let's not speak of it again. And yet that's exactly where I was fooling myself. I thought that with the amputation everything would be resolved. Sure, I expected the trauma at first, I was prepared for a long rehabilitation, but the experts told me I'd eventually get used to it. "There are excellent prosthetics these days," they said, and there I was believing them.
Instead, from the very first morning after, America was still there — or at least that was my hallucination. The sensation that it had stayed attached, with all its attendant pains, jolts, and itches, was more than real. The nerve signals were still firing; all it took was a book, a film, a piece of news, a photograph, and there was America beside me again. It speaks to me from books, from films, from the news; sometimes it's a warm feeling, comforting, almost tender; other times it's an irritation, an embarrassment, a despair.
It consoles me that I'm not alone. The syndrome is extremely widespread — it strikes heads of state and government, entire countries in the grip of the same hallucination. Everyone convinced that America is still in its place, there for us as always. As for prosthetics, they're still being developed, and will certainly be very expensive, even if many people believe that by some strange miracle things might go back to the way they were. I don't believe it. I'm already on the waiting list for a transplant.
