For about a month now, twice a week, I've been taking a lovely early morning walk in Rome, where I live. From my studio to Piazza Ungheria. Every time, I pass by Villa Glori — dogs grazing, people running, others walking like me. Someone on a bike. Cars moving along the avenue... A smell of horse stables that I don't mind at all.
This morning, in front of the villa's entrance, there was a police car, a medical response vehicle, and an ambulance. Near the horse enclosure, a stretcher with equipment on top, operators and police officers standing beside it. No urgency. No frenzy. Blankets on a bench. I hurry off because I have an appointment, Max Gazzè's Timido ubriaco playing in my headphones. My thoughts stay on that bench, on those blankets. And so it is: on my way back, plainclothes and uniformed police, people writing, talking, laughing. No doctor, no nurse — there's nothing left to treat, nothing left to save. From the bench, too short, two shoes now stick out, looking like boat shoes, out of place and out of season; from the backrest, a wrist. From a distance it looks dark, not skin tone, as if it were dirty. The hand can no longer be seen, just as the blankets can no longer be seen. Nothing more can be seen.
Imagination is enough, just as the out-of-place cheerfulness of the young police officer I ask for information is enough. A life has ended, alone, at night, on a bench in a park where, as a child, I was taken for carousel rides and pony rides.
A story has ended. Who knows if it was ever told, if anyone ever stopped to listen to it, if anyone ever took that dark wrist by the hand, if those shoes ever kicked a ball and what streets they once walked. A story. A lost story. For him or for her, for us and for everyone.
We live in fear of being alone, a natural fear, innate and deeply rooted. Sometimes we fill it with empty choices that only deepen the sense of loneliness; other times we soften it with superficial friendships — meaning we never scratch the surface of the relationship, nor let ourselves be scratched, marked, touched. And so it seems that, in the end, we truly are alone.
Alone like the man or woman on this morning's bench, who died alone, while other lonely souls passed by indifferent, unaware, or simply alone themselves. Alone because we don't let ourselves be scratched, don't let ourselves be marked, touched, sometimes even burned. How much does it cost us to say, "You matter to me, to us, to everyone"?
How much does it cost us to let ourselves be touched? How much does it cost us to let ourselves be marked by an encounter? It costs us everything, even at the risk of being insulted, of feeling used, sometimes betrayed. But without risk, without a mark, without a touch, we lose the story of a life and its boat shoes. Him or her, a life that perhaps didn't love, or perhaps did, and deeply so. And us with her or with him. A story, an opportunity, an encounter. A life. A sun, like everyone else's life. Not alone.