LE PRIME LUCI DEL MATTINO. PRESENTAZIONE IN INGLESE: I’m happy when I can’t find parking. Lately I’ve been having long phone conversations with Carla while in the car, so I don’t have to go inside right away. Then I step out of the car, I slowly walk toward the house, and I hope he isn’t back yet, so I can have those fifteen minutes of solitude that do me so much good. If I know he’s home, I try to walk even slower. When I enter the house I try to hide the discomfort I feel inside. This is how, without realizing it, I learned to pretend, to fake it, and more importantly to imitate. I imitate my idea of an ideal wife; I imitate my friends who are happily married; I imitate who I was at the beginning of my marriage, someone I don’t know how to be anymore. I do this so he doesn’t see the discomfort I keep inside, the excess of sadness. As I open the door I am often afraid I am coming home without feeling anything for him. Before entering I always take a deep breath and I put on a mask. Some days I get the feeling he knows I am faking it but decides not to say anything. With all this faking, sometimes I don’t even know what the truth actually is. How did it happen? I remember our wedding as if it was yesterday. I remember the preparations, the excitement for what we were doing together. I had always dreamt of that day. In my head there had always been a husband, it was something I always wanted. I only had to discover who that was. I had already decided I wanted to marry before I met Paolo. I always thought the only way I would become a woman was by having a husband. I was a happy woman, how could I not be? By marrying I was making a serene future for myself, curing my fear of loneliness once and for all. That’s why we were happy, and we weren’t the only ones: everyone seemed to be. Now I wonder whether it was a coincidence or if I was looking at my own life through their eyes. Everything was clear and immaculate, like the sheets on our queen-sized bed where we would sleep and make love for the rest of our lives. At first I was so enthusiastic, and I was easily satisfied: buying a couple of colorful breakfast bowls, white dishcloths with blue trim, a throw pillow, new towels for the bathroom. Perhaps it was just all in my head. In fact, come to think of it, we almost never used half that stuff. Most of it is still practically new: the wok, the champagne glasses, the Japanese teacups, the pot to make beef bourguignon… Our house is full of candles that have never been lit. Like the two of us. Their wicks still white. Before getting married I often imagined my life with Paolo, I would talk to him every night, telling him about my day, what I did and what I dreamt of doing with him. I imagined the dinners with friends, and the intimacy as we cleared the table, after everyone had left. I imagined the evenings spent just the two of us, watching a movie on the couch, snuggling under a blanket. Almost none of the things I had dreamt came to pass. We started talking less and less, to the point that I convinced myself people don’t need to talk if they really love each other. As the years go by, it is certainly less tiring to endure silence than to talk to someone you are not interested in anymore. Certain topics have become taboo, and so, afraid of saying too much, we ended up saying very little. Sometimes I wonder whether these unspoken things were responsible for our growing apart. Now, my days are sad and nothing transpires. He takes my sadness for tiredness. Nothing surprises me anymore: not Paolo, not life, not myself. I wonder when the future I imagined began to fade away and where those dreams I had on my wedding day have gone. Maybe there is something worse than lost dreams: the hesitation to keep dreaming. We expired slowly, we fell asleep without realizing it. First we emptied our future, then did the same with the day to day, the present. When you can’t get what you want, you end up loving what you can. My husband has become a brother, yet in spite of this I can’t bring myself to leave him. I see everything that is wrong with my life, but I’m paralyzed. I dream of waking up and of being another woman, who leads a different life. And yet, if I left everything behind, I know I would miss it.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 17:41:14 +0000
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