IF GORIZIA WERE NEW YORK CITY
by ELEONORA BRISSI
The idea of talking about love evokes in me the voice of Carrie Bradshaw who off-screen wonders about the why and how of this contradictory feeling.
The author of the iconic journalistic column, Sex and the City on The New York Star, to understand her emotions and sensations or to justify her choices, exploits statistics, the anecdotes of others and the experiences she herself lives. For some absurd narrative combination, the questions she asks, and the research she carries out, never find an answer, but they always have a conclusion that turns every catastrophe into an exciting perspective.
So, to write these lines, I asked around, to expand my personal statistics and try to outline a framework within which I could plant the seeds of ideas about love. A bit like in the cult series of the early 2000s, each friend I turned to offered a different vision.
My Miranda, who in this case is an accountant and not a lawyer, argued that love is something potentially indefinable and that many delude themselves into thinking they can feel it simply to deceive their brains and thus cheat the loneliness that inhabits their lives. I sincerely hope that she is wrong and that love is something incredibly more poetic, even if sometimes it is impossible to blame her.
Charlotte, who has just got married, offered a more optimistic vision: the marriage has highlighted all the qualities that her partner has had since they have known, but that during the brief engagement he had buried in some not very remote corner of his actions. For example: now they go out together on Saturday nights and he even allows himself a beer or two, while before he avoided worldliness as the worst disease. I also know another version of Charlotte York: the one with the broken heart, who after years finds herself alone and sees the projects of a shared life fade in front of her. That girl knows that love is a serious thing and that it does not end overnight, that to rely on someone you have to put your heart on the line and she is not willing to do it with just anyone.
Samantha in the second season puts aside her single life and tries a relationship, which makes her very happy, even if every now and then she still wonders if true love is the tranquility of the couple or the continuous chase of first kisses and more or less broken hearts that find consolation in the next man, at least as long as it lasts. The Samantha I know are perhaps a little afraid to let go, to verbalize what they feel and, consequently, to transmit it to others, but I can reassure their partners: they are loyal and in love; they will not repeat it to exhaustion, but they feel it with a rare intensity. Love for them is very physical, but it also has the ability to untie the mask of a strong woman (which they are) and show all the universe they carry inside, in which, every now and then, they risk getting lost.
My friend Stanford, on the other hand, for the first time in his life finds himself leaving aside his Stilnovist beliefs. After yet another, perhaps not even unexpected, disappointment, he decided to lead a period in which not all love is romantic suffering, but, without beating around the bush, only sex. For the first time, however, I saw him amused and perhaps even a few years younger, as if a new adolescence had taken possession of him.
Skipper, who, unlike Stanford, does not give up the sweetest and purest vision of love, confided to me that from now on he will look for the right woman, the one to take to family dinners and to present to friends. The project is ambitious and often pushes him to wonder if he deserves such a story, if there is anyone in the world willing to see beyond physical appearance and lend an ear to his shy voice as he tells her: “I listen to you, it’s nice to talk to you.” If among the readers there is a dreamer who aspires to a love of “Sense and Sensibility”, know that there are still Edward Ferrars who will carefully guard the promises of eternal affection.
As for the author, I can only say that, after years of sentimental and unreal visions of the feeling in question, today she is engaged and for four years she has stopped wondering what love is. For a long time she had imagined it as golden filaments floating in the ether, beautiful, of course, but, in the end, intangible. She believed that love was a prize and moved on invisible tracks that traveled in the opposite direction to her own and that she would never be able to grab that beautiful firefly, which brings us back to the magic of when we were children, with the world to be discovered, and no trouble that could not be solved with the kiss of the mother. I believe that love has ceased to be a theoretical question around which to define existence, but that it has become the pragmatic reality of that kiss that cancels out pain and enhances the joys of everyday life.