Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Llast box. It seems to happen to almost everyone. Every move is left with a packet packed in the attic, for years, sometimes forever.
And no one who misses something locked in there, waiting to be recognized.
For us it went like this: on the eve of the eighteenth year after a change of house, perhaps unwittingly ripe for another existential transition, we found him in the way.
And in your hands: that previous existence of ours suddenly reappeared on a Saturday morning. The central section of a bathroom cabinet (but the other pieces?), Board games for which there was obviously no more time (nor desire) and – above all – a casket of disparate objects, non-precious objects under the lens of a global merchant but fundamental to my naked eye.
How can I not have sought them out, desired them, not even thought about them? Perhaps because at the beginning of the new millennium, when we moved, they already belonged to a previous life. My life in the eighties.
The high school, then the university, until the fall of the Berlin wall – and the entrance to the school of Journalism. I took them with me to the first apartment as a salaried employee, to the second and finally to the cellar of the third which became the basis of a new family.
Each piece now appears bizarre but incandescentas oxidized as it is transparent to memory. Plastic earrings purchased with great economic effort in an alternative Milanese shop; a geometric necklace by Anaconda, a showcase of wishes for students of the State University (not only from then, I guess); a compact passed from my mother to me without speeches and dedications, as always.
It was a wave that stretched into the corners of the weekend. Nostalgia for twenty years, of that feeling – sang Guccini – of having (and being) everything by chance: after all, not a glorious season for me and yet promising, whole.
I can’t help but think of the 20-year-olds of this 2020-2022, wedged in the contagion chessboard: to the journeys that they could not make, to the kisses that they could not try, making a mistake until the day when maybe you see the road that leads to the king or queen. Or even just to the horse making its anomalous move against the warp of horizontals and verticals.
The sacrifice of freedom of this generation cannot end in the last box of our move beyond the pandemic. Because as the turtle master Oogway a Po said of the film Kung Fu Panda “Yesterday is history, tomorrow mystery, today is a gift”.
Which, in fact, is called the present.
What initiatives should the comparison between past and present lead to?
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