Andrea 42– In Turin, the far north of our 1000 red km, it’s raining. And the news is not this one, but the previous 41 days quarantine, where, as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen water fall from the sky. When it happens after so many days, my feelings are always the same. We are in the final scene of “Sapore di Mare”, it’s raining on the beach, there is a melancholic vibe and thoughts and actions are projected to the world that starts again. Marina Suma in that scene is crying, she says it’s because of the rain. But who cares, this is not the point. In that world the Gregorian calendar doesn’t matter. September is like January. Today in Turin it rains, and in my head the 4th of May, or so, is the new September. “Sapore di Mare” (taste of sea). Final act. And when the sand is wet and the holidays friends have loaded their car, with one hand we say goodbye to them and with the other we dial the number of those in the city, that we left for a month and that now we want to meet up again. And with them we write the list of things to do. At number one there is “get a gym membership”. This time at number one there is “cancel the gym membership”: between dumbbells, mats, barbells, exercise bikes and domestic workouts, for at least six months I will try to exercise at home. At number two: tidy up the house; this time, I will mess it up, because I had two months to clean everything, I have a move to organize and I really hope to get started soon. At number three there is “I want to travel more”: we won’t be able to do this yet as well. If possible, I will take great tours of Piemonte and Porto, that I wanted to visit and to taste, I will drink it nearby, in the Langhe, but it will be called Nebbiolo. Let’s face it without so much sadness, perhaps we should have told Marina Suma: “it’s not the rain, you are crying because you are going to miss some things.” I will miss them as well. It’s raining.
Miriam 42 – Oh yes, at least once in our life we all asked ourselves, what if Marina had told Jerry that those were tears? Would their life have turned out different? For better or worse, who knows. But their life would have taken another turn for sure, to maybe come back at the same point, that meeting point in a club twenty years later, only to realize that yes, they had lost something important. We have lost things, in these 42 days that felt like twenty years. Time will tell if they were important or not. Indispensable or not, this is up to us.
I’ve lost my “anger rush”, the one that makes me swear when stuck in traffic, and I think, in the scheme of things, that it is not at all indispensable. And if there was a list of the “good intentions from September 1st”, the first thing would be “be more patient”. I’ll be more patient, I won’t be afraid any more of the “inactive” time that I thought was empty, lost, because I realized it isn’t empty at all, on the contrary it is full of all that is invisible to the eye and that, as we know, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says, is essential. For me and those around me, to experience with greater awareness what is happening.
The second thing on the September list would be “Write!”, with a huge exclamation mark to serve as an exhortation to do it all the time, to not stop with the first laziness, because if there’s something I realized during these long days is that putting my emotions on paper helps me to analyse them, as an omniscient narrator, and to really understand where this story, my story, leads.
The third thing would be “pay attention”. Pay attention to the needs of those around me, starting with who is next to me, living under my own roof. Pay attention to those who pass me by, because, lost in my thoughts, during any normal day I barely notice.
As for the things you miss, dear Andre, don’t worry. It’s only “heavenly nostalgia”.
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