so I try to fall asleep as fast as I can, but I am so nervous about how to advance our game that I can’t sleep a wink. At midnight I am still tossing and turning in the cold bed, when I decide to get up. Without turning any light on, helping myself only with the feeble street lighting that silently enters the window, I reach the kitchen. A good mug of milk and cookies is the only solution in these cases. Years ago, it was my grandfather who prepared me these night eating and to keep me company in front of a good mug of barely that he was heating in his steal pan, always until it boiled and often making it drop on the flame that started to creak and change its colour hit by the sudden liquid.
When he could start to drink it, I had almost finished my milk with cookies and so I was the one who kept him company until he didn’t finish to drink its hot mug. At night I’ve always been more talkative than in the morning, so I used to break free from a lot of discourses
and doubts about what was about to happen the day after. These nights together, usually, happened before university exams, so much it was the tension that I finished revising so late that a mug of milk was a great help in order to get some sleep and relax after the study day.
Sitting at the table, today, I still feel his strong absence, in a concrete way and not only as a hurt feeling, but just as a tangible lack. Now, in front of my cup of milk, I can’t talk to anyone, and the perfume of barely burning on the stove is missing too. One time, in order to relieve the pain, I prepared also the barely beside my milk in a steal pan, but this thing just made me feel worse, and so I promised myself that I would have tried to go on, pulling me off as much as possible from past behaviours without lose the memory of these beautiful moments with him.
CHAPTER 5
Away
After my escape from the café I keep walking away with definite steps without never looking back as if I’d committed some bad deeds.
Like a thief afraid to get caught and with the adrenaline for the last moves, I move away as fast as I can and I take the first bus that I step into without even knowing where it’s going to take me. I have a meeting in the centre at late morning and so I will be able to drain all this excitement for that little flower abandoned in her hands. Giving her a flower, how did it get into my mind? I try to imagine what is happening now at the café, maybe she threw away that little daisy that is already withering in, laughing out loud with her friend. Did I become the laughingstock of the day? But my hope is different, I wish I’d been able to break through her thoughts, where I can hide in a silent little corner ready to discover new things about her. I ran away afraid that our story made of looks could change, but deep down in my heart I may really hope this could happened. I would like to be a little fly, buzzing around their heads, looking into her eyes as blue as the sky and caught every small grimace of her face with all the thoughts that can come into her mind looking at every single white petal. I am almost tempted to go back but now I am too far and tired.
Luckily, the bus leads to the centre and even if I did it, she wouldn’t be there anymore. I found a seat and I sit down letting me cradle by the speed of the big means of transport. My fellow travellers are all silent and ready for a working or studying day, or even only for the morning stroll in order to kill the long days that you experience
when you reach a certain age. Many of them have a book opened between their hands, others are listening to music, others are lost in their thoughts. An old lady at the bottom of the bus draws my attention, dressed up in red with a big empty shopping trolley beside her. Her look is tired and she dangles at every curve. I got to thinking at how I will be when I’ll be old, and the first thought that I have is exactly that I don’t want to be alone, I want to reach that age with someone I can share everything with, even the little daisies picked up on the road. I go back to think of her while outside the window I see the majesty of the city and its impressing monuments that frame any adventure of my life.
When I got quickly off the bus at Vittoriano I suddenly woke up from this bliss reached between thoughts and the flowing of these beautiful places outside the window. The old lady gets off with me too, ready in front of the door holding with one hand her loyal shopping trolley while with the other she held for balance. We separate at the stop and I follow her with my eyes until she turns the corner at the bottom of the road, almost to check that anything bad happens to her and ready to help her if she needs anything. Sometimes it won’t take much to empathize with someone who will then disappear from your life forever as fast as he/she entered in it for a brief moment. I look at the watch: I am definitely too early for my meeting at the museum of Piazza Venezia and so I take advantage of taking some pictures at Fori in this beautiful day that deserves to be burnt in a visual memory. Just by coincidence, I see a little daisy popping up from the edge of the pavement and so I manage to take a close-up with the blurred monuments in the background that gives the illusion to be out of world
and time. I would love to send it straight away to my mysterious fellow traveller but I wouldn’t really know how to deliver it to her, not even knowing her name. Once home I’ll save it also on the phone, it will always be ready in case I manage to reach her through some more computerized way.
Strolling around the centre of Rome really takes you out the daily life and between the tourists you can even lose track of space and time.
A constant flowing of languages and colours between a lot of people armed with cameras and flashes smiles to fix entire days spent visiting the Eternal City. The gladiators at Colosseum are always ready to take part in the photographs under a very large reward and there are carriages that accompany the most willing to try new dimensions, because while in holydays schemes must change at least for half an hour, carried through the city in a chariot completed with horses. The hooves on cobblestones hide the noise of cars and the city seen from above tastes different, stepping back into the past. The queue in front of the Colosseum is already long despite the cold and the waiting times, ready to have a sight of one of the world most famous places to take back to their city photos and souvenirs to give to their friends and families. Later on, are going to arrive also the couples of newlyweds still dressed up for the usual photographs between the most amusing scenarios of the Capital, and so this place will acquire a new aspect and meaning for who choose it as his/her destination.
After spending the morning pretending to be a tourist, I come back with deliberate pace towards the not too far place of my meeting. I meet my interlocutor by chance at the base of the Vittoriano and so we decide to talk about my job open air without locking us up in his office
between paperwork and the dark of the room. They want to remake the fliers of the Monument and so they need new photographs, maybe taking advantage of the view of Rome that you have going up to its highest part, available only to chosen few. I’ve already worked for them a couple of time in occasion of particular exhibitions inside the ‘typewriter’, as the Altare della Pace is called in Rome. Since in 2000
they allowed the access of the staircase, once in a while I like to spend a few hours visiting the Vittoriano, seeing all its features dedicated to Italian cities and regions, and the part that I enjoy the most is the sacrarium of battle flags, countless artifacts ad sigils that taste like past between the texture of the consumed fabric. I am glad to accept the job and I immediately begin to take some pictures, taking advantage of the access to areas not granted to regular visitors. From up there, the city grabs you between marbles and ancient Medieval buildings until the luxury of the ancient Rome, all in the same view. It almost looks like you can touch the sun and immerge into the clear sky that blows cold blasts from time to time to awake you from this surreal and magic atmosphere.
I would like to stay there, curled up in some space between the columns and the endless staircase to see Rome and all that little ants that move back and forth through the streets below. I pick up my courage and I leave that place charged with so much history that it almost makes you hear the voices of everyone who was there before you, before that theatrical monument had been built. I decide to walk home, taking advantage of the day that spared us last night rain. I take a picture of the puddles that reflect the streets and in one there’s me, reflected with my blue jacket and blue jeans, black messy hair, and
sunglasses hidden behind