Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

They had rediscovered the abundance of time, but somehow it felt like time wasted. Enthusiasm eluded them, always just out of reach.

After four days of the Web Summit and two months of eating in mediocre restaurants, Anna and Tom needed a proper break, a cozy hideaway to fall back in love with their lives. All the short-term rentals were either booked or too expensive, and—they suspected—probably didn’t have heating.

Back in the day, looking at images like those and knowing how frustrated and unhappy they had been when they took them made them feel ashamed, deficient, as if the reality presented in the photos should somehow be capable of triumphing over how they really felt, and that their inability to enjoy such a desirable life revealed a flaw in their character. They had outgrown this insecurity. Now those images just seemed like a con.

Spring will come. They will try to settle back into their old life. They will mark the arrival of the warm weather by moving their office to the outdoor tables that the cafés will have pulled out of storage. They will find new clients among the impresarios keen to capitalize on the latest wave of fish smokeries, sourdough bread, and poké. They will hazard a few nights out and find their bodies are less efficient at metabolizing the drugs. With

They will show their friends photos of the house, the surrounding landscape, the sea just a stone’s throw away, and they will sense in the tone of their friends’ promises to come and visit that they actually mean it, unlike with Sicily. They will take what they will claim will be their last ever MDMA, really believing it. Then they will finally leave, excited and emotional, sad to be closing one chapter of their lives but eager to start another. They will take a photo of themselves in the glass doors of Schönefeld’s departures terminal, trying to replicate their pose and expressions from all those years before. During the flight they will hold their smartphones up to study the two photos side by side, zooming in to look at the wrinkles and shadows on their faces, and finding there the years passed: two kids leaving, two adults returning.