«Ccall me as soon as you can.” Here we go again. My friend A. knows how to be peremptory when she wants. For two or three years he has been in a troubled love relationship: he is the classic “corpse collector”. Stop everyone. I’m speaking metaphorically about those (but there are also those) who never close a story, they simply keep them all in suspense, so you can pop in and out of other people’s lives. It’s like having a wardrobe with lots of clothes and choosing which one to wear every day.
The collectors in question enjoy all my admiration because it’s really tiring to be able to make people rotate like balls in a juggler’s hands. Everyone needs to feel that they are the most important. We are not talking about sending around bouquets of roses, but about empathically convincing the other person that, in the end, there is no one like him/her.
Now, my friend A., a few weeks ago, had decided to call it quits, having discovered that “her” him had finally chosen her an official girlfriend. And it wasn’t her. Having miserably failed the equality theorem, A. couldn’t stand it: “I don’t even call it dead anymore.” “Okay,” I said, “but delete his number, so you’ll have to dial it to call him. And in the meantime maybe you’ll change your mind.” Let’s hope so. Yes, because my role in this story was the unpopular one of showing them every time the amount of wasted time he could have spent with someone else.
Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
“Are you calling me or not?” Oh, yeah. “There’s one thing I absolutely have to tell you,” he begins. I sit down, because it usually takes a long time. At that time? «I’ve been seeing someone else for a few weeks and… everything is fine». For once, words fail me. Then I switch from the “fervorino” mode to the “listening” mode. She can’t stand it anymore. «It’s crazy how in one week he gave me everything that…». What she persisted in looking for in the other.
This post Valentine’s Day story is dedicated to those who are looking in the wrong place. You can waste a day, a week or years digging around in the wet while looking for plastic. Or you can delete the wrong phone numbers and hope that you are now unable to memorize them.
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Antonella Baccaro’s articles on I Woman and on Corriere della Sera.
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