room for chance

there are so many things i could tell you (now)

x,

there are so many things i could tell you,

now.

remember how we were sipping aperols and eating and laughing like we’d known each other forever? well. i wrote a note that day, right below your movies, books and restaurant recommendations.

i thought it was ironic that you asked me about clarice lispector and that you laughed when i told you she was the mother of the insane girls. but then i told you that i wanted to introduce you to hilda hilst, so i showed you my tattoo. then you said my voice and my hair and my smell reminded you of someone you’ve known, but you didn’t know who and i said: “same!!”.

well, i lied. i knew what you reminded me but it wasn’t someone.

it was a situation

-ship

you showed me pictures of your cats and of your last days in the country side and, even though you are a nurse, you asked me for a cigarette when i told you what my job was. and you laugh because laughter was probably the language we found to understand each other at that moment in our lives.

well, it’s 2 in the morning and i can’t sleep thinking about those 6 and a half hours. i can’t sleep because i;d love to tell you all the things that have been going on and can’t sleep because i am excited about all of the things i am about to live. it’s as if i were a six-year-old girl again, waiting for the morning to come to go on a school trip.

maybe i still am that girl.

when i came back home i cried on the train but not because i was sad. because it was the first vacation in a couple of years that made me realize how happy i was with the life i’d built. because for the first time in a really long time i was excited to come back home. and because i’ve realised that while we were chatting in that museum.

i wasn’t planning on going to a museum that day. it was my first day in the city, and all i wanted was to wander its streets and get lost. i wasn’t planning on stepping into a museum, and i certainly wasn’t planning on finding a room dedicated to one of my favorite writers.

annie ernaux is french, and that trip was supposed to be about elena ferrante—her city, her streets, her dialect, her language. but sometimes we travel looking for one story and end up finding another.

it was in that room dedicated to annie ernaux, while i was taking a picture of you, that i realized the beauty of what was never meant to last.

just like an acid trip, we were not supposed to last. that day was not supposed to last and even though we knew it, we were taking pictures and trying to hold those moments more faithfully than our memories could.

most things in life aren't supposed to last, but we don’t think about that. we don’t think about hands, windows, the beauty of the weather, the beauty of the wind. we don't think about how it was not supposed to rain for a few days, but it did, and that made us enter that museum. and that bathroom. that’s the beauty in life. we were not supposed to meet, we probably would never have crossed paths

nor hands. yet

we did.

it was not destiny, but both of us leaving room for chance. for a coffee, a tea, a drink, some bruschettas and arancinis. a laugh. an insight. a poem. hands. hair. nails.

that day, while we were going through the underground of the city i took a note —and a picture— to remind me that water always finds its way. they can build an entire city underground, but if water has somewhere to go, it will always come

like we did.

i’m writing about/for you because of that.

i’m hoping you get to cross a lot of not supposed to last things in your life. i'm hoping you keep on leaving room for chance. that there are a lot of beautiful things keeping you up at night. i’m hoping that there is a poem or a quote about me in your phone and that when you casually scroll through your photos and you see a picture from that day, you smile

like i do.