Member-only story
JUST TO TALK ABOUT — PERSPECTIVES
The ruthless light of the elevators
I’m 21… OK! That’s not correct. I’m actually 51, but inside, I swear, cross my heart, I stayed at 21.
Probably because it’s my favourite number. Maybe because it has always represented me or much more likely because it is the age when I remember becoming an adult though still lulled by the echoes of the height of youth.
Then there’s it — the lift. That small, convenient, inexorable and merciless daily trap that, for inexplicable reasons, waits for nothing more than to remind me who I really am.
I leave my house, perhaps overthinking, I pass the packages from one hand to the other to press the button and call the lift to the floor… I wait.
That song starts automatically in my brain and I begin to hum it, enjoying the natural reverberation of the stairwell and the sun that, creeping through the large windows, illuminates them… It happens almost every time. Still humming, I look at the mobile phone screen, I slide my finger quickly through the proposed images observed by a lazy, inattentive gaze.
I hear the lift arrive, the doors open, I get in, still looking at the screen of the mobile phone that I am putting on standby, I put it in my pocket, press the floor button and at that exact moment,