summing up the 12

New Year´s Eve baccalá, empty freezing square, faithful friend. The return to the city of over a million and the return of the ex who seems determined to become a non-ex but will eventually fail again. The birthday and the carnival, the little cheetah girl with the red nose, no pancakes, do it again, laugh. Hikes and love, the tick, his friends slowly becoming mine and his friends slowly fading away. “I just forget to buy you flowers”. Brother´s nuptial feast while excruciatingly detaching. The void, the black hole, finally the rage. The recovery. The rumpus dot net. Cheryl Strayed and Stephen Elliott. Tiny beautiful things (that I deserve). Motorbike with the Londoner. The 100-yrs-old-happy-birthday-nonna-party. Meet-up group, riding my bike against the pole at night ´cos the river is so nice, how can you not look at the river instead of looking at the street? Venice with the insane millionaire on the watertaxi, your friend´s hideous wife at the same freaking airport (please let me go). Summer (sort of). Tennis: the challenge. Internations and his roommate (please let me fucking go). High Summer (still sort of). The bbqs. Bonnie´s angry perversity. Poker, the German-Andalusian Antonio Banderas: explosion of admiration (too bad it´s too late, too bad it´s too much). The little Buddha, Happy Old Soul, Green Pedestrian Crossing.  Silence. Deuter on my shoulders, Oviedo (but you bought me cookies!)-Leon-Santiago. Trails, leaves, blisters, ocean, rain, sun, wind. The Camino friends. Lo Sprao. Awake your soul. It´s awake. Cabbot Cove and Murder she wrote. Finis Terrae. Commencement of a smile. We *heart* Emilia concert. Bocconotti. Non-awkward yet non-appropriate friend-love. Caregiver-chaos. The neverending Budget. Meeting, ppt-avalanche, workshop.  Infinity. The queen of presentations. The dimple-sweetie charming private taxi driver for a night, stinky mango Arbre Magique. Throw it away. Funfair and Funfriends. UN. The interview. Dear GentlemeNTS. (How can I possibly write that!) FFM, Goleador and falling crown. SIAM. Ah, you are going to fall for Bangkok! Not really. Birthday- (non properly delicious-)cocktail on the top of the sky. Delightful Omaba 2.0 (at the Cambodian border to the American who –unsolicited- started talking to “us guys”: “Congratulations, I have just learned that Obama won!!” “Uh, yeah. Thanks you.*pause before confession*. Actually I voted for the other guy”. Well, schade, North Dakota pastor, maybe next time…). The S-p-l-e-n-d-i-d Angkor Wat. G-o-r-g-e-o-u-s Bayon. Tears. Goodbye beloved nonna, I want to hug your ashes. Silk, sun, burn, helmet-free moped, island, mangroves, lagoons. Honeymoon. Orchids, plane, home. Jim Thompson. Thanks for friends and cranberry salad. Human spinning top. Psycho-date, Sweetheart-date. Concert-concentration. Pre-Raphaelite Florence, Adventslieder for my slow friends, no-go-glances. Lina tattoo. Tsunami club, my poor dead bike. Nearly stranger around my blanket. Where are you? I still want you and don´t want to want you. Le Amiche week end. Exhaustion. Delicious Brunello, we *heart* Eric and Oscar. And Werner. And the big screen. And the movies and bread and cheese. Tennis reloaded surprise: I am not that bad at all!  Christmas market, Christmas party with Rudolph and Wixer, Banksy-genius. Home sweet home, Christmas x3, virtual Gazelle on its way, away - to the mountains- we go. Nonna´s function. Five, four, three, two, one. Gone.  

Oh, happy year.

to see, to think, to feel

Last week one morning I was walking on the street and there was this wonderful sky with a hint of sunrise fighting against the dark blue and it was really beautiful, so I thought how nature is probably the only instance that never ever fails to regularly and tenaciously find ways to impress me (no, actually also human ignorance, mine first). 
I looked at the combination of the orange-pink-violet sky with the star-shaped lights of the Christmas market hanging from the trees and found it perfectly…pretty. Everyone must find such a view pretty, I thought. And then I imagined how many people would simply stop, rummage through their purse or pocket, extract their cell phone and take a (let´s face it, mostly quite unimpressive) picture. Sigh. And then probably upload it on facebook with a stupid comment like “this am on my way to work”. Double, no, triple sigh. 

Shame on you, Mr. Zuckerberg. Mr. Jobs, Mr. (who invented digital cameras?!). No, I mean, thank you all of you for incredible inventions. But shame on you for taking us away the capacity of just looking and feeling.

If you think of it, it is a very human and somehow noble desire that of sharing what moves us with people we love, like or care about. It´s not even only a prerogative of the human species, now that I think of it, for many times my cats terrified my mother by bringing her as a trophy half-dead birds clutched in their mouth: it was a beautiful conquer for them and they wanted to share it with us.

Sharing is a nice, friendly, lovely and even instructive act. 

Compulsively sharing is the plague of our time.    

We don´t watch our children anymore: we photograph them and show them to whomever we come across that goes beyond a simple “hello”, whether they might be interested or not . 

We don´t taste our food anymore: we take pictures upload them while the dish is getting cold and afterwards even give grades to what we just ingested. 

We don´t melt thinking how wonderful our partner is and how lucky we feel to have him/her: we cover the world wide web with close-ups of us kissing until we break-up and then we reluctantly unfriend the ex and change our facebook status to “single” and everyone is “ooohhhing” us and saying how sorry they are for us. 

We don´t enjoy the view of a temple, flower, animal, person: we try to capture it with our digital eye before it´s too late, otherwise we will forget the moment and it´s going to be lost forever.

Yet, what we forget is that the strongest memories are those of the moments which made it into our soul, which we allowed to touch us in depth. For that, we need to give ourselves a little time, a little peace, a little calm. 

Let´s use phones for what they were invented for: to telephone.

Let´s use our eyes for what they were made for: to look

Let´s use our mind for what we exist for: to reflect.

Let´s use our soul for what we need: to feel.

Stranger in the night

(ecoute moi)

It was two and a half years ago, late at night, late August, late in so many ways.
I was sitting in the train, the very last seat of the cart, facing the wall, so that I had the illusion of being able to hide myself from the rest of the passengers. I was filled with desperation and sorrow, because I was trying  to accept the the idea that I had just seen for the last time in my life the man I was so ravingly in love with (I was very wrong, but could not know it then). And I could not stop the tears pouring down my cheeks.
I was listening to some mushy music on my I-Pod and honestly thought that nobody in the train would see me, hear me or bother about me.
And yet, while I was trying unsuccesfully to dry my mucus, tears and desperation with my sleeve, a young man, whose face I did not even see, just before getting off the train came close to me for a few seconds and simply said "Der Mann, der dich zum Weinen bringt, ist es meistens nicht wert".

It was such a filmic image. So poetic and pure and free because spoken out of mere compassion and empathy.

It was in fact not the last time I saw the man who I was so ravingly in love with, though I couldn´t know, back then. The man "der es nicht wert war" made me pour thousands of tears more until one day, suddenly, I realized that the stranger on the train was simply right.

It has been more than two years since that damp August night and today, after a very pleasant Christmas party, while serenely walking home with a light heart and no more drama in my life, I found myself thinking about the stranger in the train who was offering me a simple and true answer to my pain.

The man who brings you to tears is mostly not worth it.

Dear stranger, whoever, wherever you are, you are coming to bed with me tonight.