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Sometimes, before going to sleep, she lies there thinking. And in her head, she writes her story and sometimes, only sometimes, a tear falls on her pillow. This is one of those nights...
Her story starts with smells. All of those scents that make up her memories. One after the other, they all tie up together.
There's the smell of clothes from home - washing powder. Washing powder has always been an important smell for her, there are at least a couple of people she remembers by the scent of the washing powder they use. There was once that embarrassing moment when she met a long-lost friend and as she hugged him and a long-lost past came rushing back; and she couldn't hold back and said 'you still smell the same' and that really awkward look between them followed... And then there's also a long-lost teenage love she hasn't seen in years, and she wonders whether he still smells the same.
But she's losing track; she was thinking of the smell of home, the washing powder her mother uses, the scent of which make her miss her family, their city, their flat, every time she receives a parcel with clothes.
Home... Then she thinks about the sweet scent of her mother favourite moisturiser, oranges and lemons, the same since she was a child. She used to want to cover herself in it just to smell the same as her mother and somehow automatically become an adult.
There is that other moisturiser, the one she bought a year ago, at that time when she wished she wasn't an adult, she wished she could go back. The one she used to wear at night and then wash away with tears. It was icy cool on her face, eucalyptus and something else. That reminds her of long nights she spent on her own, not wanting to be on her own. Feeling so weak she didn't even dare calling someone.
And from scents she starts getting flashbacks, of moments, days... The last time she can remember the two of them being happy together. Walking around a suburban supermarket, and then she sat down on the grass with a picnic, slowly smoking a cigarette after the other and watching him playing basketball with a friend. She felt she was in love but now she knows, deep down she knew something was wrong, they were too far gone.
And if she remembers that, the fact that they, they as 'us', were already falling apart, it must have been around the time she went to those gardens with her parents, walking along grandiose avenues ornate with trees, flowers and peacocks. Sneezing because of all the pollen but incredibly happy to have discovered such a wonderful place in her city. For a day she didn't have to pretend everything was ok because she was ok.
In any case, she is sure it was before that day she spent with two of the girls she loves most in the world (there are four of them in total, in different countries, different continents); a day when she couldn't stop crying so they made her get up and dance and jump and sing to 'I will survive'... And they ended up crying of laughter, because the whole thing was just so damn cheesy.
Maybe that was one of the few times she felt good during those months; she knows without a doubt that she felt loved, like so many more times during the summer. Whenever she showed her weakness someone was there for her... Tears coming out of her eyes despite herself and a pretty blonde friend (one of the four) hugging her under the stars; a call, made on her birthday, hysterical and desperate, with the fourth friend telling her that she shouldn't care about what he did now, she was doing something else too; being held in her own bed when her tears just wouldn't stop; and so many people talking to her, constantly, trying to make her understand what she was and is worth...
All this drama, but she realises she needs to remember that she is happy after all.
She has had many long nights when she longed for someone, something, but they were happy nights. Like that time, sitting outside an Umbrian door looking at the moon, separated from her friends for the first time in a year, realising that they would always be there for her, even though she was far. Silly lines from an Italian song...
"Se anche tu vedi la stessa luna
non siamo poi cosi' lontani..."
Melancholy under the moon... It seems to have been a favourite of hers for a while. Like those nights, in that tiny, weirdly shaped flat, and she sat cross-legged on her duvet, hugging herself in soft, baby blue sheets in the cold London night, and she looked outside that tiny window: a row of gardens in front of her, with two rows of small houses lining it, and right at the top the white full moon in the middle of the darkest blue sky.
Bedrooms, bedrooms, they seem to be important in her memories too. A bedroom with a big white lamp and a leopard print bedcover. Or the bedrooms of her childhood; Rome, Umbria, Paris... Or bedrooms she's only seen for one night. Or student bedrooms, that all look exactly the same but manage to have so much meaning for her... Or, that white white loft, blinding during sunny mornings, when it was empty, just a bed and someone to share it with. And that song in the background.
"You in the dark
You in the pain
You on the run
Living a hell
Living your ghost
Living your end
Never seem to get in the place that I belong
Don't wanna lose the time
Lose the time to come..."
And those last lines remind her that she cannot lose that time thinking about what went wrong and why.
Finally, she has got to the point where she can admit that she is still in love with him. She will always be in love with him, there's no helping that. But there was a past before him and a future after him.
So she remembers that there are so many more people in her life. People she's loved for a long time, or for four years, and a couple of people she's started loving since those bad months she had last year. She might not be in love, but she loves a lot of people...
Despite everything, she would never give up all of these memories, the sad ones or the happy ones, even if it meant avoiding all the pain. Because if everything that had happened hadn't happened, she would be a different person, she wouldn't be who she is now. She wouldn't have met a few people, she wouldn't be where she is, she wouldn't have done what she has done, and how could that be right?
And so she kept thinking on this night, a tropical night, with the noise that she associates with summer outside, insects and warmth, soothing her.
And so she falls asleep, knowing that every night she spends like this will make stronger.
and even here i managed to do some shopping. ah ah. just bought a 60gb external hard disk. it's so prettyyyy!!!
mmmh. another favourite of mine. i love bamboo and everything they make with it here - must come from that chair i had as a baby, made in singapore and bought by my parents in the 70s when they travelled all over south east asia... (must run in the family, the travelling!)
i'm becoming a flickr addict too! it's sooooo much fun. bwahahah. slowly uploading all of the pictures from the last three months...