Pending judgement, play some house music.
a kind of script for a short movie
Setting: outdoor, morning
Weather: wind, grey clouds in the sky
Characters: only appearances
Faces hanging over mobiles. Eyes hypnotized by screen light. This morning they were acting this way. Little swallows waiting for birdseed. Guilty, pending judgement. Anxious, jonesing for Xanax. I saw them this way. Gathered and distant, each of them intent in their own world controversies.
Each of them joined in the same wait. Steps of the same waiting.
They were out there, the head above mobile screens.
Scattered with wise randomness.
They were there, in front of a closed door, waiting for a face to come out, a voice to pronounce their name.
“One by one and please avoid making gathering”.
They were there, pending judgement.
First thing, you must come in alone. No mommies allowed to hold your little hand, at most, a glinting poster with a tropical shore, as you grow up by yourself. You must enter in one by one. No mommies allowed to hold your little hand, at most a clean and hasty nurse, repeating the same nursery rhyme: “sit down, lower your mask, here you go”. “Done”. Everybody is waiting for that word.
Everybody is waiting for the little stick that is soaking with the humour of your nostrils, that is immersing into a 007 liquid, able to detect contagious enemies. That little stick, able to reverse your life, making you an explorer looking for the moment in which you have allowed the virus to come in.
Everybody is waiting outside, after. Good children who are begging for a different fate, who are asking for this is not their turn. Everybody is waiting for that voice, holding an envelope in the hands, will be a blessing. They are waiting to go away free. Free to come back to such kind of diverse normality, as the virus has made all of us even more unsure and even more human.
This morning I saw them this way, while I was trying to coordinate my muscles and bones to come out from the car, feeling the balance of the grip on the legs, straightening my back, as it supports the burden of its new rigidity — I just bent over to pick up a pair of socks, I swear, no weird twisting!
I saw them this way and my heart squeezed with tenderness. And I wanted to say theme that they would make it. But, I took a look at my watch and I headed to my appointment — Ophra and Jualianne in my ear — with my noisy and resonant machine, for a music session only for my knee. (After, the technician helped me to put on my shoe — cinderella in converse!).
I was alone in that room, with that metal machine, with that nuclear-reactor shape machine without strobe light. I was alone (“May I go”, said the technician, gently) on that automatic bed, created for not to escape from the boundaries of its track: your head is remaining outside of the tube so you can breathe and take a look to the landscape. “Please remain completely still”, he told me. And so I did while I was listening to my private concert. I closed my eyes, my hands on my chest: I knew perfectly where to turn. I knew how to cope with that moment of discomfort (because you have to stand still, into a thick-waiting-no-way-out inaction) and solitude. I smiled under the ten layers of my double mask.
I opened my eyes again just when it finished: an impeccable timing.
PS: I tried to go to the beauty centre yesterday, before baring my leg in front of a stranger. I had almost a stroke when I saw my wild forest. And still, with the awareness of a splendid actress, I rolled my pantsuit up until half of my thigh, without hesitation. I was about to say sorry to my male and hirsute hair, but I did not. I let the technician putting the headphones on my ears. I saw his hands harnessing my knee waiting for my concert to start.
Double PS: sorry for what, then?
