This Is Me
It’s 7.45 am, and the keeper turns the lights on. Every day is the same: in 15 minutes Mrs. Harvey, the secretary, will enter the room with her purple (and not classy at all) tailleur of flannel. She will go straight to the coffee machine and she will take her usual cup of coffee with milk and cream. Then she will direct towards her desk, but after 7 steps she will stumble in the sticking out piece of linoleum, that the construction worker failed to fix properly during the last renovation work. In this way Mrs. Harvey will drop half of her coffee on the floor, and grumbling and shouting she will call for the cleaning woman. Jay will arrive from the C section with her customary slow and heavy stride, dressed with the same old blue overalls and pushing her cleaning cart. The coffee puddle will be slowly and unwillingly cleaned between sighs and snorts; then Jay will go back to the C section, and Mrs. Harvey will finally reach her desk.
Now, this has been really funny for the firsts two or three weeks, but after… I don’t know, maybe almost 1 year, everything has become quite boring and predictable. I like this place, don’t get me wrong. The other guys are nice, even if they are always quite silent and I always end up with the same people. Every day I can smell the delicious aroma of the freshly made coffee, and thanks to the room I have been given I can see a lot of other people passing by. I am not truly happy, but at least I am not sad either. It is just that sometimes I feel like I have been put on a shelf, and I have been forgot there. And now I am just covered in dust, waiting for someone interested in my story, someone I can open up to. Everything in my life is ordinary, monotonous, static. Exactly like my story, if I have to be honest; I mean every single chapter of my life is linear, there is no suspense, no dramatic turns of events… nothing.
It’s 8.15 am. For the first time in several months Mrs. Harvey is lat… oh! There she is. Today her puffy cheeks are redder than usual, and the lenses of her glasses are a bit fogged. It must be because she is in a hurry. She throws a rapid and full-of-desire glance at the coffee machine, but she goes straight to her desk because she knows she is really late. The change of path allows her to avoid the piece of linoleum, and Jay must be really surprised by the change of events, because I see her head peeking out from behind the door and then quickly disappear in the C section with an astonished expression. As soon as Mrs. Harvey reaches her desk, she switches on her PC and starts to work.
After what seemed like 3 hours, I look at the big clock hanging above the door and I discover that it’s still 8.45 am. Only half an hour has passed. Seriously, why is time passing by so slowly?! At least spring is approaching, and the sunlight that shines through the window is getting warmer. I am peacefully enjoying the warmth and the light, when suddenly everything becomes dark again, and I notice a tall, thin, blond guy standing right in front of me and staring intensely at me. His light blue eyes are darkened by his knitted eyebrows. I have never seen anything like that before. He suddenly stretches one of his thin and long arm towards me, then he grabs me with only his index finger and his thumb. He pulls me towards him, then he grabs me with both hands and makes me turn a bit: now I am frontally facing him, and the sunlight shines on me again. He shakes the dust off me and suddenly all my colours shines again.
He continues to stare intensely at me. It is like he is reading me. I stare at his face, trying to detect every single sign of boredom and disappointment. But as time goes by, a light smile slowly forms on his lips. I am so happy someone is finally acknowledging me, getting interested in me. But then it happens. The thing that I fear the most. His face darkens and becomes serious and perplexed. He reaches the chapter 21, and he discovers that I am just an unfinished book, that my author did not gave me an epilogue. So now he is going to do what everybody else did up until now: he is going to put me back on the shelf, among the other silent guys, where I will smell the aroma of the freshly made coffee and stare at people passing by until someone else will do the same thing he is going to do now. He shuts my cover violently, while I give up any hope of being freed from this library. But then I realise that we are heading to Mrs. Harvey’s desk. She looks at me and then she smiles, saying to the guy ‘That book has been here for so long. The problem with it is that it’s incomplete. Are you really purchasing it? What will you do with an incomplete book?’. The guy lowers his eyes and briefly stares at me. Then he looks back to Mrs. Harvey and says ‘The story of the firsts 21 chapters is quite good. I have really liked it… I think I will write an epilogue for it myself’. Then he smiles, and I smile too. Because he made me realise that no matter what, we all are unfinished books, we all are work-in-progress. Everything we need to do is find a way to give a meaning and an amazing closing to our story. Then we will truly shine, and become the masterpieces that we are.
Thanks to Elena Iodice
