SWEET EMOTIONS

Having reached this moment in my life, after several disappointments on the part of everyone and after long periods of reflection, I realized that now I need to be treated with unprecedented kindness. No more anxieties, doubts and insecurities. I just want genuine, kind and tender feelings. I am not willing to compromise on what I want and what I deserve. Committing to capturing at least a fragment of innocence in people and feeling tenderness for it is the only way to avoid retiring to private life as fast as a cockroach when you turn on the light.

There are moments in which I would like to go back to when I was little, moments that I miss and that unfortunately will never come back. I miss that innocence and that light-heartedness that I had, I looked at the world with different eyes, a beautiful world. I imagined already after the age of 20 with a job, a guy who cared about me and that only I existed as a woman for him. I imagined many beautiful things, but everything remains the fruit of my imagination alone. I miss it when I played dolls, when I watched cartoons on TV, the beautiful ones that passed Italy one. I miss living in my beautiful imaginary world.

We played hide and seek within the city walls. I was hiding, you were looking for me. I laughed, you laughed. We spent the whole afternoon even just playing one game, because I was hiding really well, and you didn’t even know where to start looking. In the end, you always managed to find me, somehow, and all you could say, finding my umpteenth hiding place, was: “Oh!” I laughed, you laughed. We spent the afternoons like this, together, without ever getting tired, meeting every afternoon at the same point, without even having agreed. We loved each other like that. We were really too young to know what love was, to be able to say we knew it, yet there was something between us: a thread, a red thread that united our hearts, a little girl’s apron ribbon, long, perhaps infinite, he would have been able to keep us tied even if we had been at the two opposite poles of the world. Subsequently, however, all that I managed to glimpse in our afternoons of play was your miserable shadow, nothing to do with you. And finally, what I thought to be your shadow also vanished, but perhaps it was just a figure of my invention, created not to admit that you had abandoned me. I was left alone. Without you, without your shadow. Yet, I continued to spend the afternoons playing, giving the landscape that surrounded me tiny and timid smiles, waiting for your return. Every now and then I stopped, playing, and looked towards the path that led to your house, waiting to see you arrive hopping, with the hat in your hands and the sly and proud look that had always distinguished you. But you never came back. And I, I continued to wait for you: I could not accept the idea that our red thread had somehow been severed.