by Fabio Volo
I thought about my grandma: she was always knitting when I was little, so much so that I had asked her to teach me, and even learned some. On a small table there were two needles with a length of fabric that was already started and whoever wanted to could carry on the work. When I told Michela I knew how to do it she made me prove it. I was slow, but I still remembered how. Then we sat down to eat.
“What did you do this morning?”
“I went to the movies.”
“One of these mornings, if it’s okay with you, I can take a day off and I’ll come walk around with you. How does that sound?”
“Sounds great, you’re the only reason I’m here, remember?”
“I like it when you say that.”
As we ate bagels with cream cheese and tomato, she explained her proposal.
“Do you remember that the other day we talked about how when you want to be with someone without any ties they fall in love with you? But if you like being with them and you tell them that, they run away?”
“Of course I remember. It’s the problem of the century.”
“Do you remember that you also said that you must often censure yourself, because if you tell them everything, they end up misunderstanding you?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Well, I really enjoyed being with you last night. Actually, I’ve really enjoyed being with you since always. As crazy as it sounds, since before I knew you, since when we saw each other on the tram.”
“I feel the same way.”
“Then I’d like to make a proposal.”
“Should I be worried?”
“No, it’s only a silly thing, it’s a game. Do you like games?”
“Yes… Well, it depends.”
“How long are you going to be in New York?”
“Nine more days, more or less.”
“So, to avoid censorship or scaring each other off, I thought of something.”
“Come on, let’s hear it.”
“Let’s get engaged.”
“What do you mean engaged?”
“For as long as you’re here. My proposal is that we get engaged and, regardless of what happens, we’ll break up in nine days. A temporary engagement with an expiration date clearly spelled out on the packaging.”
“A temporary engagement?”
“Yes, we get engaged, we also decide now that we’ll break up no matter what. You’re here in New York for a few more days. We take care of each other, we do everything we feel like doing, and at the end of the ninth day we break up. That way it’s impossible to misunderstand each other. You said you’d like to love a person, let yourself go, buy her flowers, write her poems, and everything else; but you don’t do it because you’re afraid of committing to her and then changing your mind… I want all of those things, if you want to give them to me; and I want to be able to give them to you if I feel like doing it. Since we are here and happy with one another, why should we exchange only dinner and sex? Let’s express ourselves any way we want. It’s a silly game, I know, but perhaps a fun one, who knows? Have you ever been with someone knowing the expiration date ahead of time? It’s not just sex, and it’s not like I’ll love you forever. It’s a third way of being together. What do you say? Why don’t we try it, what do we have to lose? Rather than becoming fuck-buddies… We don’t have to build a relationship but rather live it, without sacrificing our individual freedom. Let’s see if it works, if it’ll be enough and if we exchange everything we have to give to one another in this way. I had this idea because I believe I saw something in you that makes us similar. A familiar territory to be inhabited, to be explored. Something that belongs to us both. It would be a shame to waste it. It’s always exciting to meet someone like yourself. To me, from what I can gather, you’re all this. With you I can feel the shining.”
“What’s the shining?”
“To be in sync with someone. The elective affinity. The kind of relationship you can’t have with certain people, not even if you’ve been with them for years.”
Honestly, I didn’t know what to say.
“I have to go now. Think about it… See you later.”
She kissed me and left. I found myself thrown once again into a long walk, with my thoughts fixed on that game. I couldn’t understand what it meant. Why did we need to get engaged? It would have been enough to live the moment, but Michela was a smart woman. If she said it, she must have had her reasons. I remembered that I had told her that morning, “Listen, I don’t want to freak you out, it’s just that I feel very close to you, being with you feels natural, and last night, when we took a shower and made love, it felt as if I had known you forever. It’s something I’ve never felt before. But I don’t want you to freak out. This morning, when I woke up, I even felt like going out and buying you flowers, but I was afraid it was too much.”
“The flower thing” Michela answered “is something you either do or don’t, but you don’t talk about it. As for freaking me out, if I were someone who is easily freaked out you wouldn’t even be here, right? Stop being presumptuous.”
“What do you mean presumptuous? When have I ever been presumptuous?”
“You are presumptuous. Since the first day you got here, you’ve told me not to freak out, not to get nervous. For instance, the first evening we went out to dinner you told me that you had come here because you wanted to see me again. It was a beautiful sentence. It was very moving and I really enjoyed hearing it. Why did you have to immediately add that I shouldn’t misunderstand what you meant, that I shouldn’t worry about it? Even just now you told me not get nervous. You’re presumptuous. You believe you have to explain everything to the other, you think you have to protect them, to defend them, to warn them. It would seem like a form of kindness, but yours is actually the typical behavior of a person who suffers from a superiority complex.”
“Superiority complex?”
“You are dealing with adults: everybody’s capable of deciding for themselves. If someone ends up suffering it means they had to learn their lesson and the experience will come in handy another time. This doesn’t mean that one should disregard the other—they just shouldn’t worry excessively about them either. On top of that, this is a reflection of your own fears. You’re the one who’s afraid. I don’t know why I was attracted to you when I saw you on the tram. I can’t choose everything I experience. I found you interesting. Period. Now, instead, we can decide together what we want to do. Life is not what happens to us, but rather what we do about what happens to us…”
“I guess I’m here for this exact reason: to learn how to live more serenely. I like you, Michela. And this time I won’t add that you shouldn’t freak out.”
“I like you, too, Giacomo.”
Michela had always been very straightforward with me, like Silvia. But I liked her in a different way. Maybe that game was meant to make me feel completely free of doing whatever I wanted to do. Maybe she suggested it for my sake rather than for our sake. Or it could have been just a game, but it actually worked perfectly for me. While being there with her, I began feeling a bunch of different desires. I wanted to make love to her, to touch her, smell her, feel her body under mine. To place my open hand on her back and to touch her bones as she arched it. I felt a desire for impressions, breaths, confidences, laughs, and whispered words. A desire for gestures, tenderness, caresses. I wanted to whisper how much I liked her in her ear. And kisses. I wanted to kiss her. Always. A desire to stay in bed with her after we made love, to sweat, eat fruit and laugh about the world. I wanted to completely let go, to embrace my emotions, without measuring my words, my actions, my gestures. Without having to censor myself, to hold back. Free to be what I wanted to be. Michela was perfect for that. I just had to live the best way I knew how, without fears of misleading somebody, without fears of having to escape somebody. What a wonderful thing. That game prevented me from being misunderstood and I didn’t have to make promises.
Come to think of it, the idea t
hat no matter what had happened that story would end in nine days, strangely reassured me. All of us, at least once in our lives, have met a person to whom we feel immediately close, with whom we feel comfortable. Someone who speaks our same language. A person who makes everything easier. I had known Michela was the person from the first night. When I told her I had never done something as crazy as this for any other woman. When I said that I immediately realized that I didn’t even need to say it. That it was unnecessary, because what was between us required no explanation.
I sent her a message, “From this moment on, you’re my girl. Let’s play.”
15
The Rules
That evening my girl and I went out to dinner. Michela took me to Lucky Strike on Grant Street. We talked about the game and the fact that it needed rules. Keeping everything light and ironic, we made up a few of them:
Over the next few days,we promise to do what we feel like doing. Everything we experience must be shared, because it belongs to both of us.
When one does something the other doesn’t like, it must be stated immediately. No strategies. Freedom.
Never say “forever.” Forever is an illusion. Too convenient, we are for the now.
It is forbidden to hold back feelings, to censor oneself: no matter what, in nine days we are breaking up.
It is forbidden to say what we are like: we must discover it by living together. We are introduced to one another at the beginning of the game as if we were virgins, as if it was the first time we have been with someone. Since every person we are with is like a mirror reflecting an ever-changing image of ourselves—which we often decide to ignore—we will experience this encounter without dragging in all the baggage of what we have been in the past. Let’s experience our relationship as if it were a picnic. When you go to a picnic, you don’t bring your couch, your kitchen, your bed, and all the furniture from your house. Let’s become lighter, let’s leave behind everything we have been in the past. Sometimes you only have a vague idea of the other. Often you don’t know yourself, but you portray yourself the way you see yourself, the way you perceive yourself. We will understand who we are by experiencing ourselves.
“I think I’m already in the spirit of the game, because when you say that, no matter what, we’ll break up. I’m already a little sad,” I said.
“True. But, it’s easier this way.”
“How did you come up with this silly thing?”
“This morning you told me you were afraid of buying me flowers because you thought it might have been too much. I didn’t like that. This way everything is clear and there aren’t any problems.”
“Right. Even though it’s just a silly thing, it might actually work. Where did you get the idea?”
“Since engagements, ties, and couple life are our sickness, I thought that maybe we could use the basic principle of homeopathic medicine to heal it. Do you know what that is?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know a lot about it.”
“The basic principle of homeopathic medicine consists of introducing into the organism a small dose of the substance that creates a certain problem. If someone suffers from insomnia, for instance, they take a pill with a very small dose of caffeine. This stimulates the organism into reacting and building its own defenses.”
“Then in order to heal from engagements, we insert a small dose of it into our lives, a mini-engagement.”
“Exactly. Today, as I was drinking my coffee, I was flipping through a magazine and found an interview with a terminally ill patient. He explained how, from the moment he learned he only had a few months left, he began to live everything more intensely. The proximity to the end led him to pay greater attention to every little moment of his life and to appreciate every small emotion. Often, we live life as if it were forever, and we forget about these moments. The article was entitled The Joyous Search for Emotions. I thought that often, even when it comes to relationships, the use of the word ‘forever’ leads to forgotten moments and empty routines. That’s why an engagement with an expiration date seemed like a way of living our encounter in a different way. Without paranoia of the future, without dragging in our pasts.”
“What if, over the next few days, we find out we are way too different?”
“Well, that would mean that our conversations would be very interesting. Or it could also mean that we’ll break up early.”
“True, and maybe we can even manage to see beyond our differences.”
That evening, at the restaurant, we did something I really like doing: talking about the couples at the other tables, imaging their situations, their love story, the way they live their relationships. We tried to guess which one was in love the most, how long they’d been together, and if they both wanted to be there or rather one had forced the other to go out for dinner. It was a lot of fun. I often play this game with Silvia. The best guesses always come up when the couples don’t talk. Once, I saw two people who didn’t open theirs mouths the entire dinner.
“Some couples are really sad. I wonder why they don’t break up.”
“Because together they’re miserable, but alone they’d be even worse off. It’s a shame, because there so are many beautiful things in a relationship between two people.”
“Divorce, for instance.”
“And affairs. No, come on, seriously. There are wonderful couples out there. I think the important thing is not to be stuck in certain roles: boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife.”
“Then what are those beautiful things about being a couple?”
“Intimacy, a sense of belonging. Personally, I like to memorize a person.”
“What do you mean you like to memorize a person? What about routine? What about monotony? What’s so great about them?”
“No, I’m not talking about routine or monotony, but about memorizing a person. I don’t know how to explain it any better, it’s like when you memorize a poem in school, in that sense, that’s what I mean when I say memorize.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Yes, come on, like a poem. It’s not by chance that in English you say to learn something by heart.”
“It’s the same in French, par coeur…”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. To know a person by heart, to memorize them, means that you pick up a bit of their rhythm, the way you do when you repeat a poem. A poem, like a person, has its own rhythm. So by memorizing a person I mean synchronizing the beats of your own heart with theirs, let their rhythm pervade you. That’s what I like to do. I like to be intimate with someone because that implies the risk of becoming slightly different from our old selves. To change a bit. Because when it comes to relationships what fascinates me is not remaining myself but rather having the courage to become someone else. And that person is, after all, your other self, whom you would have never met otherwise. I like to love a person and memorize them like a poem, because, like poems, you can never understand them completely. In fact, I finally realized that when you love, you only really get to know yourself. The most you can understand about the other is the most you can understand about yourself. That’s why being intimate with a person is really important, because it becomes an existential journey of discovery. That’s the same thing your friend Silvia was trying to tell you when she was talking about open doors… do you understand?”
“Hmmm… Yes, I think so. Did they slip something in your drink? I know I’m screwed up in the head, but you come a close second. That’s why you don’t have a boyfriend, because you’re like Penelope who’s waiting for her man to come back.”
“I wish I were Penelope. It’s true she had to wait, but the man who came home was Ulysses. Think about how she must have felt having him home. What she must have felt being in his arms again. Certainly, she realized he was looking at her even when her back was turned. Maybe she was doing the dishes and he was sitting at the table. She must have felt his gaze and how much he loved her. She must have felt loved by an invisible gaze. Now, instea
d, you may wait for years and then you find yourself rooming with a man who doesn’t even know how to fix a leaky faucet or someone who pretends everything is fine and doesn’t say a word, not even when things are falling apart. The issue is not the waiting, the issue is who you’re waiting for.”
After dinner we went home. Even though it was Friday night, Michela had to work the next morning. However, she told me that the following week she would be taking a few days off to spend the whole time with me.
The red wine we had at dinner had made us tipsy. Not drunk, just the right amount. As they say in Spanish: al punto. That feeling you get when you go home and you feel like jumping on your partner and in the morning you find your pants on the floor with the legs turned inside out and the pockets emptied out on the floor. That’s exactly what happened to us.
16
Getting to Know Each Other
I was going to let my imagination run wild, “No matter what, we’ll break up in a few days.” There were exactly eight days left.
Since the moment we got engaged Michela and I immediately got into a routine. I would write her notes and put them in her purse, in the pocket of her jacket, skirt, or pants. In her wallet, even stuck on the screen of her laptop, so when she would open it, she would see them in front of her. It was great to be able to freely express what I felt. That morning Michela had left me the keys to her apartment because we had agreed on having dinner at home and that I was going to cook. I went to get some groceries at Dean & Deluca, on Broadway and Prince Street. I had to exercise some restraint because every time I go there I feel like buying everything: fish, sweets, fruit, vegetables, housewares. I only bought what I needed for dinner, plus some flowers and a bottle of wine. Then I went to buy one of those erasable markers.
I went back to Michela’s. Before entering the apartment, I noticed that the mat in front of her neighbor’s door had a really funny joke on it. Instead of the usual welcome it read: Oh no! Not you again.