smoke

One day I was discussing with a friend about relationships and I started wondering.

Why is every social relationship characterized by such strict rules?

Why does everything need to have a specific, crystalized shape, that everybody accepts?

Is it this the most optimal solution? For sure it is comfortable to know what to expect from different social contexts, but still there is such a pressure to maintain it, so much judgment toward who questions the standard definitions.

Sometimes I get the feeling we are just shapeless clouds pretending to be humans, and we are not even good at that (for sure I am not).

(The original story is in Italian, this version has been translated using DeepL and then manually revised)

the story

The sudden sound of the alarm clock filled the room bathed in morning gloom. Resigned Joe reached out to turn it off. Here was the beginning of another day. He rose wearily from the bed. He had slept badly and felt less himself than usual. Perhaps he was just still asleep. He would recover quickly, probably feeling the fresh air on the way to the office. He opened the curtains and let the spring sunlight invade the room. He turned around leaning against the window and stood for a few seconds looking around. It was his room. The unmade blankets still had the shape of his body. A photograph was leaning on a shelf on the wall. It depicted smiling people, a family perhaps, he was not sure, he had never really investigated, but their cheerful expressions put him in a good mood to start the day, usually. He dragged his body toward the bathroom to get ready. He stopped in front of the mirror. His complexion betrayed the sleepless night, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Perhaps someone at work would comment, but they were all too polite to point it out to him. It was one of those days that reminded him of the passage of time. His smoky, shapeless body judged him from the other side of the glass. He had always thought it was a hassle to create the outline of his torso and keep it more or less vertical, but that morning he didn’t even feel like shaping his arms and legs. He stretched out one end and tried to touch up his face a little. The nose was the part he did best. He had a talent for noses, everyone recognized it. “Oh Joe, if I was as good as you at doing my nose,” many people had told him. But over time he had become lazy and stopped trying to improve himself. In the end what good is a mouth? If you have a great nose the rest of your face is no use. Or at least that was what he told himself. He would have liked to ask that colleague of his on the second floor, though, how he drew his eyes so well. They were truly incredible, the best he had ever seen. It was getting late. He took some smoke from his head and shaped it to form a hat before going out into the street. He liked the idea of a hat, it allowed him to hide the shape of his head and he didn’t have to worry about shaping his hair, those were a nightmare. He walked through the door and found himself on a cloud-filled sidewalk on his way to work. In about twenty minutes he would arrive at the office, but he hated how crowded the street was in the morning. At least in the evening he could leave work late when the city was now deserted and he was free to float around without having to struggle rhythmically to lift his feet off he ground. Except for one time when he had passed a stranger just outside the office and had not noticed that he was about ten inches off the ground. He had stopped abruptly, trying to figure out why the other’s disgusted expression, but only realized it later. Thinking about it again filled him with anger. He was tired, he wanted to get home fast, but he couldn’t take shortcuts, no, he had to lie on the ground like everyone else and move those ridiculous legs back and forth, because that’s what a good person does. But that was not the time to turn to the past. The office was waiting for him.

It was five minutes before the lunch break. Finally, he thought. He had spent all morning in his cubicle in silence. The computer in front of him was off, lifeless. But that did not mean he could put little effort into his work. His fingers resting on the keyboard moved swiftly from one key to another. He had taken a course in being faster years before, when he still cared about making a good impression on colleagues. He had been taught that the trick was to choose a sequence of letters and always repeat that one, one time after another, because most naïve people think that moving their fingers randomly is the best way to appear busy, but the experienced eye immediately notices if someone is typing randomly, it senses lack of concentration, instead with a specific sequence the fingers move with a purpose. At the time he had chosen the phrase “the ceiling is rolling and dripping and I am here dancing.” He did not know why he had chosen it, but he had become very good at typing it. He had even once won the Employee of the Month award, those were good times. The ringing of the bell brought him back to reality. It was lunch break. He got up wearily from his seat and headed for the stairs. He used to go to the roof and have lunch with Jim, from the second floor. When he stepped out into the sunlight, Jim was already waiting for him perched on a chimney at the edge of the building.

“Hey Joe.”

“Hi Jim.”

Silence. They stood there, a few steps from each other, looking at the city in front of them.

“You look really bad.”

“I slept badly last night, I don’t know why.”

“It’s because of the game isn’t it?”

“Jim, can I ask you a question?”

“Ask away, but not about the game, I just couldn’t watch it last night,” laughed the colleague.

Joe tilted his head to square it better.

“Listen Jim, have you ever watched a game?” Did that question make sense?

Silence again. Jim seemed to look at him confused.

“Joe, are you all right? Of course I watched a game, we watched one together last week at my house with our two friends from the second floor, don’t you remember?”

He did not know exactly how to rephrase the question.

“Jim, what is a match?”

“What kind of question is that?” his tone was surprised “Watching a game is when you are all together in front of the television, chatting, occasionally cheering if you feel like it, looking at the blank screen, in short, the normal things you do when watching a game.”

“Why are we watching the game?”

“But to get together, to talk, sometimes it’s good to see each other outside the office. You are strange today.”

“The office, let’s talk about that. What do we do all day?”

“We work, we move our fingers, the things everyone does.”

“Yes, but why do we spend all day wiggling our fingers? Have you ever wondered? Why do I have to leave my bed every morning, check in the mirror that I have a shape, that it’s the same as always and everyone else, and then throw myself into a crowded street to come here where I have to spend eight hours in a cubicle wiggling my fingers?”

Jim this time seemed to stop and think. With a slow gesture he turned his head toward Joe. He brought his hand toward his face and slipped off his glasses. How good he was at making those glasses, he didn’t know if he had ever told him.

“Joe, this is our life,” he replied confused, “Why do we do what we do? Because it’s what we choose to do. Why is my face shaped like my face and not your face?”

“Because you aren’t as good at noses as I am?”

“Joe, I spent years learning how to model these damn glasses, do you think I couldn’t have spent a few weeks replicating your nose? I have this face because I chose this face, because I woke up one day and looked in the mirror and said to myself, ’everybody has a nose, everybody has two eyes, I’m going to have a pair of glasses'”

“But why? In the morning coming here we are surrounded by others like us who woke up and decided to have two legs and two arms, maybe without even considering that there might be other possibilities. I never did. I said to myself like every other morning, “Damn my legs, how I wish I could float,” but I didn’t, I put my hat on my head and walked out the door on my two legs. Distracted by how beautiful my nose was, I accepted my life. My life? But why, why did I do that? Every day I wake up and look at a picture I keep on a shelf. There are human beings in that picture, smiling, with their two legs and their hair perfectly disheveled and their noses so immeasurably more beautiful than I will ever be able to do. And that puts me in a good mood, I tell myself I’m just like them. But we are not, look at us, we are clouds of smoke. When it’s windy we have to concentrate so we don’t get blown away and end up who knows where over the horizon. But just as I think “damn my legs,” everyone will have had even one moment when with a handful of smoke in their hand they said to themselves “maybe I can be something different.” We’ve never even seen human beings, for all we know they don’t even exist, but here we are imitating them. Who knows if our vaporous fingers are faster or slower than theirs at tapping on keyboard keys. Yet here we are, worrying about the shape of our noses, carefully assessing whether the stranger next to us on the sidewalk is moving his legs acceptably. I’ll tell you what. If you enjoy so much feeling like a human being and fiddling with your beautiful glasses, finding yourself with your friends on the second floor watching the game discussing how good you have become at moving your fingers then I salute you, I have nothing more to say to you. There must be another way to live.”

And with these words Joe stood up, charged with compassion he stretched out a tentacle to caress the outline of Jim’s face. Who knows if he would have missed the certainty of a shape. The terror in his colleague’s smoky eyes could not completely mask his curiosity. With one last gesture the cloud that had called itself Joe took its hat, its legs, and its name and became a ball, a grayish ball of smoke and let a sudden gust of breeze carry it away, somewhere over the horizon.