The alarm sounds and a sleepy sigh re-sounds in the tiny room, as an answer to the annoying beep. Anyway she was already awake, it is impossible to sleep properly in this country. “Why don’t you use blinds? Jesus Christ, eight months waking up to the sunrise.” She comes out to the corridor, the mirror is just in front of the pale blue door of her bedroom. “Oh my God, my hair! The humidity makes me look like an African woman”. Her black curls are the double in volume than when she is at home, back in Italy. She looks so sleepy in her pyjamas… She goes down the stairs very slowly, feeling the cold floor under her feet. She is not wearing shoes.
The first days it was shocking for her to see all the Irish walking around with no shoes or shocks. But then, she decided to join them. After all, shoes are nothing but prison for feet. There is always dust on the floor because the cleaning man spends more time lying on the coaches than brushing the stairs, but no one really cares. They are students, they allow their feet to be dirty. Out of the sudden she remembers when she was in the States and she used to look at the kids of the house playing barefooted on the grass. One day she took her shoes and socks off and started playing with them. It feels weird that this thought came to her mind while heading the dining hall for breakfast. Imagination works in a different way when we are in the territory between dream and reality. She now joins the Irish as two years ago she joined the kids, with no shoes, barefooted to feel the cold weather of this country in first person, ‘in first feet’, barefooted to play their games, to share their lives.
‘I hate when people talk during breakfast… That musical Northern Irish accent is killing me. So early! Too early to talk… None should ever talk before 9am’. She is staring at the little waves the spoon made in the coffee. Staring as everybody stares when they just woke up, staring as if they were not physically there, staring at something trying to understand that they are not sleeping anymore, that this is reality. Trying to accept that it is 9am and it is time to go to college.
She is sitting with her back towards the door of the dining hall. Every time the door squeaks she turns her head, making the curls dance in a semicircle, to see who is coming. Secretly she expects him to come. She always does. Every morning, every day, everywhere. The third time it is him. She turns her head to the back of the dining hall and then to the front again as fast as she can. But a little shy smile arises from her lips. «So stupid, I’m smiling at the coffee. Should I look now?» No, wait. «Hey, what’s up» he says in an almost inaudible volume, looking even sleepier than she does, barefooted just like she is. And then she stops staring at the coffee to stare at him, it is definitely a better view. And replies with a little and timid ‘heyy’ sluring the last ‘y’, perhaps as a consequence of the musicality of her mother tongue. The smile is visibly bigger now.
«I wish he talked to me in the morning, before 9am.»
Un diario para la complejidad 