DAY 26: OUR PLACE IN THE SUN

Miriam 26 – Today, dear Andre, is our 29^th day of quarantine, but it’s also the 3^rd of April 2020, a day I’ll remember for a long time.

Once again IT is gaining ground, feeding on our certainties. You know I don’t want to call it by its name, I promised I wouldn’t at the beginning of our Diary.

And I won’t do it today either.

From tomorrow, Italy will wake up a little more orphaned, even if I really hope it is only for a while.

And even a tiny piece of my working life today, at 9.15 pm, in that exact moment, will stop.

I’ll have to say goodbye to that emotional young woman, sometimes over the top, confident in the others so much to be often fooled, in love with only one man, the man of her dreams, who she fought for and with whom she built a family, with whom she experienced happy moments and moments of crisis and that today, the 3^rd of April 2020, she is about to lose forever.

Her life will be on hold for a while, and mine as well.

I’m going to say goodbye to an important part of my life, a part that is not just mine, but of at least three million people every night.

But it’s only a goodbye, I promise. Meanwhile her and I are going to stay here, to keep telling our days to all of you.

Andrea 26– We all have a “place in the sun”, Miriam. The one inside us. And even if 26 days of lockdown have put glasses and windows between it and us, memory is stronger. It’s stronger than the distance from the place in the sun of my room in Naples, the one I come back to for a few weekends during Christmas and Easter. The one where I can still find my books from university, high school and middle school, together with the cup I won in middle school for a poetry contest and the Tex collection my dad started when he retired. It’s stronger than the red keeping me from my place in the sun on the balcony of my grandma and aunties Telly and Mary in Scalea, that overlooks the sea, confines with my aunt Lydia’s home, looks at aunt Anna’s house and looks down on the beach and the memories of all of us cousins. Memory is stronger than the km of red sea separating me from our holidays in Sardinia, the ones where Arianna became Samantha for me as well, and Filippo became Michelangelo, and everything was so easy when we would turn up the music the evening in the garden. Memories are stronger than trains and empty planes separating me and my friends from a sunny table in Naples, where we have been sitting every year for 26 years to play Fantasoccer. A place in the sun is every night around me, when the artificial lights illuminate the sofa where I sit with Vale and Cecilia. I’ve known you since always Miriam, but tonight more than ever I’m telling you to stay “serene”. Here and always. I have no doubts we will revisit these places again and hug these people. And a place in the sun will still be there.