I remember a crucial moment in our friendship, our first serious conversation. I believe it can be called serious in spite of the fact that we kept drinking wine mixed with Zabov and the effects were felt ever more intensely.
I remember it vividly because at some point during the evening I went to the bathroom and I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked at my image but I couldn’t look myself in the eyes and feel like myself, as usually happens. I felt as if I was a third person, outside, staring at Rossella. I had exited my body and to re-enter I had to show myself that I was me. I started repeating my name to myself, the various facts of my life. I said, “You’re Rossella! It’s you! It’s me. I am Rossella.”
The American universities, in their application forms, ask you to write a personal assertion. It has to be something revolutionary and original. “The committee needs to understand that you’re a fantastic and fascinating person!” I don’t know what the hell to write except that I’m a strange sort who for some reason is in India and when she looks at herself in the mirror has out-of-body experiences.
“…You’re far away and you have the chance to discover yourself and think about yourself…”
I want to be worthy of my 18 years, yet I’m going through a period of childish curiosity. I’m not an expert in psychology, but this seems to be an oral/tactile phase when I taste, try, and touch everything. I’d like to have an infallible plan for my future, an ideal career and the right studies to do it beforehand. But I only want to rest after India, to do all those things that I’m terrified I won’t otherwise find time to do.
I want to fall in love, I want to find that love that makes your head spin and your breath come short. I want that unstoppable passion, not a flame but a conflagration.
My desire to live is equal to my hunger.
When something is good, I can stuff myself in a way that is, to say the least, NOT feminine, enjoying the wonderful flavor and the sensation of fullness that comes afterwards. When I like something, I can’t say no even to myself. Then comes the day when I look at myself in the mirror and realize that what were handles now look like a love-lifesaver! So I decide to put the brakes on, to concentrate on other things (generally less pleasurable), to diet.
But just as hunger and the smell of chocolate always win out, so my mind, the ideas, the energy, never stop. Everything keeps going in an unstoppable cycle, like that of my metabolism! The analogy life-food is banal, but I’m tired and insatiable. I had to express SOMETHING of what was going through my head today.
It’s frustrating not believing in god. You’re on a mountain at the top of the world, you’re a crumb in an enormous landscape whose beauty equals its size and you ask yourself why you want to cry at such a view? Total green, then, kilometers away, you see some of the highest mountains in the world, covered in snow. You barely have time to turn around when a cloud covers it, sliding like cotton candy among the peaks.
Where the hell does all this beauty come from?
MomComm: I think I know where Ross was standing when she had these thoughts. I remember vividly once walking along the back of the Chukker (i.e., the north side of the hill above the school). I looked up and suddenly saw the far, high Himalayas, and I wondered how it was possible that something so beautiful was there, and I was here to appreciate it. I still didn’t believe in god, but I could see why many people believe that gods live in the Himalayas.
