Life

“La donna francese” was me

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I lock the door to my office and leave the lab. The day was not very productive and I am frustrated. It feels quite different from this morning when the sun was promising a bright day. I step into our shit-covered street and walk quickly to my bus station. After four years, I am well trained to skip all the feces belonging to our dear bourgeois dogs and gallop as if I was playing Twister!

I get in the bus and sit at my favorite place near the heater. I watch the people who do their daily jogging around the garden. I think about my running project. I have recently bought a new pair of running shoes and found a training program on “how to run in eight weeks”. All I need to do is to chose the first week. I close my eyes and automatically think about the conversations that I have had during the day; some were funny, some were serious and, some were dull and irritating. I feel annoyed. Little things upset me these days and they are not the main reason for my edginess. Deep down I know what is bothering me, but there is absolutely no solution to it except running away far and fast. I should have escaped, figuratively, three years ago but I let myself go with the flow and enjoyed the ride. Now it’s time to put on my new shoes and go far away.

But before I go, I have to make a salad! I am invited to a dinner and promised to make my now-famous exotic “wild rice salad”. I need some vegetable and of course the wild rice, which is only sold in organic stores. First, I go into the fruit shop. The sellers is yelling at full power to attract customers to his two-for-one strawberry deal. Strawberries in this season? The world is going upside down! I buy three times what I really need and head out.

I start to grumble about the guy ahead of me who is walking sideways like a drunkard as he is talking on his cell phone. I speed up and pass him. I decide to play a game; it was my turn to slow down and piss him off. At this point I hear him saying something like: “Ce una donna francese – devo andare”. Thanks to my Italian friends, I now understand few words, so I suspect what is coming. I walk faster, which probably intrigues him even more. In this cat and mouse episode, he manages to place a generic complement about my “beautiful eyes”. I feel obliged to respond! I slow down, look at him and smile. He didn’t look too bad. In the short thirty second pause, he told me his name, that he was from Sicily and he invited me for a coffee. I told him that I am married (I lied), to which he responded: “So what, I can not have coffee with a married woman?”. I told him: “No, this is when you should run as fast as you can”.

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