THERE IS ALWAYS A WAY TO FIND YOUR LEGS

Aperitif with women in Piazza Anfiteatro, soft lights, street musicians, bars and picturesque restaurants envelop me on this early summer evening.   At the table, needless to say, we talk about men and I am amused by the idea that, despite disappointments and, fortunately they are still at the center of our curiosity.  Phone beep, WA coming historical friend…” Sara, he left me, call me immediately, I’m terrible!”.  I enter emergency mode – rescue friends, goodbye square and aperitif, phone call until late at night to pick up the pieces.

While I try to stem tears and anxiety, I listen to a story I have already seen before, already experienced on the skin… everything seemed beautiful, perfect fit, irony, lightness, complicity, important feelings declared or suggested until yesterday and then, suddenly, WA message that liquidates you in a minute.  Looks, laughter, endless evenings exchanging life disappeared in an instant, canceled in a violent click and then the heart crumbles, the legs that no longer seem to support you. They say it’s “normal” because we are in the era of everything and immediately, of flash loves, today I love you and tomorrow I don’t even know if you exist and if you don’t exist a WA message is more than enough to make you disappear from the horizon.  I don’t see anything “normal” and I don’t think that superficiality is a child of our time or that it belongs only to the masculine, perhaps it is simply more visible. I smile thinking back to my grandmother, to her concrete and simple Calabrian wisdom when she told me stories of men who disappeared into thin air after leaving the house to buy cigarettes. After all, every time has its own modalities but the common matrix is always the same.

  The friend on the phone is visibly distressed, she believes she is worth nothing, she gives in to the trap of annulment.  I also think I got the words wrong to understand or tell, “superficiality” is not good, the exact term is “fatuity”. Yes, my dear friend, when you lose your loved ones you become like pieces of ice that block everything, freeze everything, immobilize everything.  One becomes fatuous and the reality of the other, his feelings, his existence are no longer there, no memory remains as if they had never existed.  It hurts, I know, but if we can see him we will walk again, I can only stay next to you for a while, my dear friend, certain that there is always a way to find your legs.

Sara Lazzaro