fragile trembling leaves

Spring is not spring, this year. The buds on the trees are eager to blossom but the rigid temperatures are spitefully putting off the enchantment of the rising season. All is grey, cold, soggy.
It will come, everybody thinks, another day or two, maybe a week, but it must finally come, this spring so much longed for. I need it. We need it.
Actually, some may need it more than others. 
Two days ago I finished reading a wonderful, fierce, powerful book, a "yes book", books that change you and your view of life and of the world. 
The still point of the turning world, by Emily Rapp, is a work poured out of the depth of an aching and profound soul. 
It´s a tribute to the life of a terminally ill baby who died just before turning three. It´s the narration of a myth, as the author so eloquently explains. It´s a beautiful, beautiful book. 
While reading through those powerful pages I felt at traits like a voyeur, so intimate was the glance that the reader was allowed to throw into this unfortunate family life. So intense the empathy arisen. I often thought of a friend of mine and his son, who is also affected by an incurable and degenerative disease.
How unfortunate, how unfair, we all think in these cases. But pain, disgrace, diseases are so damned democratic: they just hit anyone, no matter how good or bad you are. I once read on social media a cynical yet funny statement: finding unfair that bad things happen to good people is like expecting a lion not to devour you because you are vegetarian.
And this is what happened to a dear colleague of mine: devoured by the lion, even though she is vegetarian, lovely, calm, intelligent, beautiful, inspiring, strong. Two days ago she comes into my office, asked how my Easter vacation was. Very good, thanks, and yours? She bursts into tears, right there, standing in front of my desk. I´m sorry, she says, sobbing, her voice full of sorrow and fear. I have Parkinson. What? Fuck! What? It can´t be! What the fuck, I screamed within myself, in a rush of disbelief and rage. And a blank, speechless face is instead what came out.
This incredible woman, whom I met less than a year ago when, to my surprise, she joined our company (wait, I thought, she is so cool, what is she doing here?) is eventually going to turn into a trembling leaf. This brilliant, independent, self confident woman is probably going to have to depend on others.
This appalling news is not giving me peace.
I can see her eyes filling with tears, I can feel her fear. My colleagues did nothing, said almost nothing. I stood up and went to her and gave her a hug. And she clung to me as if this would save her from falling. Her hold struck me as much as her diagnosis.
We are all so fragile, even though we pretend we will last forever. We are all sure that spring comes punctually, yet sometimes winter just lingers on, and on and on.

what was that word, mhmm...wisdom?!

Walking home from a hyper conversational night, I ask myself "can you trust someone who doesn´t drink at all?". I turn into my street and a wobbling human (maybe) being, as boozed as one can get, walks past me. Or tries to.

Yes, you can trust someone who doesn´t drink. Actually you should. 

No, you must.

Resolution, revolution, whatever. How´bout what I want?

I want silence, sleep, rest, introspection. And blasting music, sleepless crazy nights, hyperactivity, carefree superficiality. All well balanced. 

I want wide-leg and high waist trousers (which don´t look like my Grandma´s).

I want to share a bed solely and exclusively with men who sweep me off my feet. The lame thought “well, he´s kind of nice after all, it´ll do for now” is from now on strictly forbidden. 

I want to breathe deeply and deeply and deeply and deeply. 

I want to cancel my facebook account and use the time that I waste on reading my “friends” ´s idiotic comments to finally dive into the unbelievable chaos of my I-Tunes library and discover what music I actually like. And have. 

I want to play tennis and clap on my shoulder each time that I see the tiniest improvement and not get mad at myself for not being a late-starter Serena Williams.

I want to sing Julia Stone´s songs but not just like that, just singing, no! I want to sing Julia Stone´s songs while playing them on the guitar, myself. This may imply that I finally learn how to play an F, which currently for me it´s more or less the equivalent of saying that I need to finally learn how to wake up at 6 am and go for run before the office. I mean...easy-peasy, right? 

I want the memories, all the memories, to teach me, pamper me,  console me, warm me up,  enrich me, give me peace,  give me strength. Even if they refer to moments or people gone forever, that broke my heart or hurt me badly or made me mad. 

I want the courage to believe strenuously in every cell of myself. Even in the fat ones.

I want to keep calm, even when I am mad and hyper frustrated, even when my mother pulls the triggers of my mind and drives me mad, because I want to remember how much I love her and how stupid it is to waste time arguing about trivialities. Life is a bunch of days and I want to use them well. Very well. Absolutely well. 

I want to ride my new bike with the excitement of a little girl. Even when it´s cold and I tell myself it´s time to buy a car.

I want to keep writing letters to my precious friends, to keep writing on the blog, to keep writing. To shower with my words and thoughts, to moisturize my soul with reflections.

I want to be authentic; even if among my friends “authentic” is now a witty synonym for being a bitch. But I know I am not a bitch, I am just not always aligned.

I want to forgive, but not to be expected to forget. Forgiveness is a lesson, if you forget, you don´t learn.

I want to bake cute cup cakes and do hard-core handicrafts and melt the engine of my new sewing machine by creating hipster colorful “stuff” (I know I still cannot call my creations “clothes”…but just give me a little more time and I´ll get there).  

I want to be grateful for my life, my family, my friends, each of my experiences, my falls, my failures and above all, every accomplishments of mine, which I so much tend to take for granted.

I want to discover the surroundings.

I want to enlarge my world and life.

I want to be just fine.

And satisfied.

And cool. 

You, Thirteen, I am very ready. 

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.
 


  

shining stars tonight

Tonight, this lady and me.

Thank you, Des!

I beg your pardon?

I live in a city of over a million, very densely populated and with loads of buildings, apartments, lofts, houses, abodes, lodgings, accommodations. Hotels, yes, also a multitude of hotels. And hostels! And couch surfers! Millions of beds to rest at the end of the day!

Now, how is it in heaven possible that the Australian guy who crossed the hemisphere to move here just  two months ago, who I met last week and went on a date with last night, how is it for heaven´s sake possible that of all the apartments in this city of over a million he happens to live in the one right above my ex?!

His bedroom exactly above my ex´s ??!! Not even, like, one on the 1^st floor and the other on the 4^th, nop! Same street, same building, same staircase, one on the 2^nd floor, the other on the 3^rd.

Statistically…how many chances, really?!

It´s clear that someone, somewhere, has a great sense of humor (including me, because each time I think of it, I have to laugh).

Oh boy.