Chapter 2
Once I got home I made some lemonade for myself and sat on the on the chipped steps of my old house’s porch, barefoot, sipping my drink slowly. Traces of the sunset were still streaking the darkening sky, where deep purple clouds floated in the moist summer air. The heat enhanced the odours, filling my nostrils with the smell of pine and cooking lingering around my neighbour’s house. I could hear the kids’ hushed voices followed by laughs, fragmented at first, then loud and uncontrollable. It felt good to be sitting on my porch, taking it all in, slowly. I stood there a while after the house next to mine fell silent, and all I could hear were the cicadas, singing their lullaby somewhere in the night.
After the owners of the house had passed away, their kids had decided to rent out the place for cheap, in exchange for a few renovations. I had done most of them myself during the week-ends, repainting the walls and fixing some windows. I had wanted the house not so much because I could stay there almost free, but because I needed to sleep under a roof drenched with life and history after spending my days in the aseptic atmosphere of FoodTech labs. I had found refuge in work during a difficult moment of my life, using it as a tool to turn away from real problems, to limit my horizons to a model world where things were simple and problems were like the buzz of a fly in the summer, of no consequence at all. I had always been a diligent kid, but after that critical moment in life I became addicted to work in a way that I realized was unhealthy, without really wanting to change it. I had the runner’s high, so to say, and it felt good in some perverse way to keep it up well beyond exhaustion.
And yet in the last months something had shifted slightly within me, although the change was imperceptible from the outside. The hole that had been carved in my existence that winter of 1991 was still there, I could keep it silent for a while but it would wake me up in the middle of the night, now and then, leaving me lonely and disarmed. What I had shyly started to admit in the last months was that I needed more than work therapy in life. I had grown up in a small town where everyone knew everyone else. There were about one hundred households, one bakery that also served as coffee shop, one grocery shop, one tiny theatre and a school, and a large chemical factory that employed almost everybody in the town. I think that I became who I am at least in part to honour my father, who was an engineer in that factory. In 1991 I was 11, and I had moved to NY to live with my grandmother. The change had been huge, neighbours barely acknowledged each other and making friends in the block where I lived seemed impossible. I slowly socialized with some of the kids at school, and after some time I began seeing some of them during the afternoons, every now and then. But overall I became a solitary girl, spending most of my time in the library or doing homework at home. Things could never be again as they had been before NY, and I can say without too much bias that the beginning of my adulthood coincided with the day I moved to the Big Apple.
When I walked back inside the house the darkness felt too thick and a familiar pang of pain grabbed my guts. I turned on the lamps and took a shower. The water started off cold, as usual, but the air was hot and I didn’t really mind. By the time I was done the anxiousness had subsided. I found the book I had left on the kitchen table and walked to my bedroom upstairs, the stairwell squeaking under my weight. The cicadas were still singing, and a full moon was glowing through the open window. The night felt maternal now, and I fell asleep with my lamp on, the book slipping away from my hands.