“L’appuntamento”

My God! A whole evening of bliss! It was a fleeting feeling, the kind that comes and goes but and when it arrives, it catches you completely off guard and stays. A sensation so vivid, so immediate, that you can’t quite catch your breath before it sweeps you away. I had an appointment—though I didn’t call it that, not in my mind. It was something more: a moment suspended between what was coming and what would inevitably pass.

I fumbled through my closet in the morning searching for the perfect outfit not just to impress, but to somehow embody the very essence of how I wanted this moment to unfold. As I picked through my clothes, I found myself lost in a sea of thoughts. Thousands of valves opened and I needed to let loose, somehow in a river of words, dreams and memories, slipping in and out of them. I stood in front of my closet thinking that each piece of clothing could hold a potential version of me, each outfit a different possible self. I knew their face by heart, but each time I thought of it, it felt as if I were rediscovering it. Their pretty eyes: warm and easy came to mind, I started day dreaming but in that moment, standing in front of the mirror, there was also a shadow, something subtle and sad that lingered behind the excitement. I could feel it, the awareness that no matter how much you hope, no matter how much you wish for the time to stretch out endlessly, it would slip away, just as quickly as it had arrived. I wondered, with a sense of fear creeping in, what would happen if they didn’t arrive? If that moment never came to pass? Would I lose myself in that absence? It was the strange beauty of this feeling that both tore my chest and lifted my spirit. So, I ran toward the ticking clock, carrying something in my hands for them. I couldn’t show up empty; I wanted to offer them something beautiful that would carry weight in our encounter, something to bring back with them, something to have value in their lives when they left. The time we would spend together—however long or short was already slipping into the future, destined to vanish before I had the chance to fully grasp it. And yet, in that very anticipation, in that subtle anxiety of knowing it would end, there was a kind of urgency to be close to someone I found amazing and feel that joy of simply existing.

There was also an understanding that this moment, as temporary as it was, would never be repeated. It was finally evening and after a deep search and a certainty of what was happening, I arrived and I stood there, oscillating between two extremes: calm and chaos. I asked myself was it possible that in the space between our meeting, I had already become someone different? And if I did not meet them—if I did not have that encounter—would I cease to be? In those seconds, the answer didn’t matter.  I found the perfect excuse to distract myself by looking through the windows at the houses nearby, wondering how people go on with their days—peeking into their lives and being unnecessarily nosey. Have you ever noticed how the perfect distraction often comes from your curiosity about other people's lives? Well that didn’t last long…my mind was so deep in thought it went back to questions that left me suspended into a strange in-between space. I was exercising the purest form of living in the moment, knowing that it was precious too, that something would change the instant we met, and yet it was worth everything to feel that shift. To know that something in me would irrevocably be different afterwards. I feel like I changed so many times that day. Familiar footsteps got closer to me, and in that instant, everything I had felt, every worry, every flutter of joy and fear, came to a halt. Time, which had felt so fragile, suddenly became real again. And this, this was where it really started. But that's a story for another time.