Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
SValentine’s Day has passed, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief. My “night shift” is over and will return, God willing, in a year. I allude to tour de force to which Valentine’s Day now periodically subjects us.
A party should be a party. So why, dear friends as a couple, and not only, do we make it such an ordeal? My phone is buzzing with recriminations, threats, ultimatums addressed indirectly to other people’s partners and some temporary requests for asylum.
The day dedicated to love thus becomes the litmus test of our lives spent next to someone else. Or alone.
But I remember other phone calls, the interminable ones in the first moments, when we couldn’t wait to meet the other, our hearts fluttered and strategies were drawn up between us, of course, but to shorten the anxiety and the waiting times.
«He was the great love of my life» someone confessed to me, probably exaggerating in his tone. “I’ve already forgiven him too much,” complained anothervibrating with resentment.
«What would you do in my place?». When you get here, to this question, I take a breather and I think my choice has always been to preserve myself. But I know that’s not what happens in most couples because there are children, above all.
But also why in long-lasting bonds one ends up losing pieces of oneself and acquiring a physiognomy that is no longer one’s own but it is certainly not, and fortunately, a copy of the other one. In this involuntary and definitive osmosis, the sense of what one was, of what one wanted and what one desired for oneself is lost.
Valentine’s Day instead, with that unbearably harmless and sappy air, is there to remind us, once a year, of the distance between our dreams and what we have become. That love should be cared for every day, as we do with much less important things. And that sometimes it’s too late to do it. An awareness that lasts twenty-four hours and then magically disappears, overwhelmed by everyday life. Poor heart, today is already the next day, in another three hundred we’ll see.
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