His alter ego
The alarm clock trills inexorably. I close my eyes wearily and make the first gesture of the day: turn on the other side. A few more minutes pass and I force myself to make the enormous effort: get out of bed. Staggering in the dim light of the bedroom, I put on the white shirt left on the chair. I slip into my dark trousers and let myself be guided by the automatisms of everyday life, I let my hands adjust the tie. I put on my jacket, black shoes, the steel watch on my wrist. The mirror shows a slender figure, dropped in an anonymous dark suit, sleepy and apathetic, a faithful copy of the dull expression of the face above it. That fifty-year-old is me. I look down annoyed and the corner of my eye falls on the pile of colored shirts that overflow from the closet shelves. I blink in amazement and suddenly, I regain consciousness of the other side of existence. I am a sailor, a gritty protagonist of countless regattas, always running around with my accomplices, jumping from one boat to another. From this dark and muffled room, it all seems so far away, almost impossible, yet… it’s all damn true. The face reflected in the mirror now unequivocally shows the traits of a very not very conservative existence. The wrinkles around the eyes, typical of those who have been sculpted by the wind for years, together with the tan, denounce a past that is different from what the gray suit would suggest. Even the initial tired posture has given way to a new image, while the chest shines boldly from under the jacket. In front of the mirror, now, there seems to be someone else or perhaps, it would be more correct to say…. his alter ego: the sportsman, the athlete, the sailor. That strange creature for which a day is good or bad, not as a function of solar radiation, but of the intensity of the wind. Precisely he, the stainless, the one who does not age, who does not get fat, who does not get tired, the one who does not dream of sailing, he does it. The one done upside down, the one for which bad weather is more beautiful, the one that never hurts anything, the one for which the year is not marked by the succession of months, but by the succession of regattas. That bloody homeless man who is lively and makes me feel lazy and old while being exactly my age. How is this metamorphosis possible? How can a mediocre bourgeois turn into a charismatic athlete with the simple resurfacing of a memory? An endogenous, almost unconscious, subtle but disruptive response. A need for escape that originates precisely from the claustrophobic urban everyday life that slowly but inexorably forces the bored bourgeois to flee the unnatural and constricting metropolitan context, originating an instinctive drive that leads him to integrate with a grandiose system such as the natural world and especially the sea. The hidden secret, the trigger of mutation, paradoxically arises precisely from the most banal and coercive urban everyday life. Feelings of profound freedom, of harmony in nature, to finally feel part of creation. Divine sensations but which unfortunately have no value in the pragmatic and structured metropolitan society. The two take turns. The one living an existence antithetical to the other, temporally chasing each other to become momentary protagonist of the one reality that both must share. Two antithetical beings, contradictory but protagonists of a single existence. Two independent worlds, light years away that seem to have nothing in common except that wardrobe, in which they both store their clothes. A lacerating dichotomy, enclosed within a single door. The man with two faces, with two lives, just like all of you who find yourself in the closet partially invaded by another. Clothes, protagonists of another life but strangely, have been neatly stored right inside your closet … and if you wear them, you will find that they fit you perfectly, being exactly your size, pay attention.
