MIRIAM 16– I promised that I would have written today’s diary for somebody else. That it would have been an Italian story different from mine and yours, dear Andre.
Today my diary is Susy’s diary.
The first thing Susy will do, as soon as this is over, is going back home. An infinite crowd of people will run down the street, happy (just like we did when we won the World Cup back in 2006, and I dare to say even happier), they will fill the squares, hug and kiss until dawn.
I know in real life it won’t happen this way, I know that even with the virus defeated we will still have to be careful and cautious for a while. But that is just my mind wandering, and when it wanders, my mind doesn’t care about safety distances or any other caution.
Susy will walk upstream through that crazy broken joy, she will walk happy, deeply happy, but also deeply tired.
Tired of seeing suffering so up-close, tired of fearing for her life, tired of having to question her certainties for days, months. Tired of gloves, medical masks, sleepless nights and never-ending shifts. But happy because when everyone will be out in the streets celebrating, she will finally be able to go home, enjoying the quiet of those four walls, the sweet certainty of the daily routine, the laziness of a few days of deserved rest the hospital will allow her as a thank you for never giving up.
Susy, faceless heroine, will shut the front door behind her back and will let go to her first awaited, craved, deserved tears of joy.
ANDREA 16 – I’m following your theory of the contrary, Miri. These days we have been thinking a lot about the things we miss. Today, instead, I’ve been thinking about what the Coronavirus gave me: the human dimension of my colleagues.
It’s not like they were aliens before, for goodness sake, but the lockdown forced us to shut the front door of our homes and to open them up via Skype; the virus isolated our children but at the same time it forced us to introduce them to everyone, every day, through their voices, their sweet intrusions, their homework and the revisions of the grammar, the multiplication tables, and the rainbows to show the teachers at the end of the day. And so through a camera that shows me a closeup of my colleagues faces, I see them, all striking the same pose (as your director would say) but all different from one another. Without make up, without a suit or a tie, professionals and moms, professionals and dads. Men and women. Not just managers. Human beings.
And I notice the differences between one another not through their writing style or their manners during a meeting, but looking across their closeup: their homes and their styles speak of the worlds they have built during the same years in which they were coming to work at 9am. And I find “consultants” and the white walls behind them, and all they care about is the crux of the matter of a call that starts and ends with the topic of the day. E I find “creatives” asking “how are
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