I am wondering if we are still able to be alone. I found myself wondering what I will be without internet and how my life would be without it. Up to five years ago I didn’t have any internet connection at home. The problem of not being able to check my e-mails every 20 minutes, the problem of not being able to talk with my parents and my friends living in another country did not exist at all. For the last two years in my parent’s home in Italy we had a very slow Internet connection. Never I had the temptation of spending, not even one of my nights, sitting on the chair, staring at the screen, passively swallowing the streaming of information. Bits and bits, megabites and gigabites of information: a flood.
Also, it is my condition of expat that makes the internet a crucial medium in my life. Living abroad, nowadays, means having a constant possibility of keeping in contacts with all of your friends and all the people you like all around the globe. The result is sometimes a sad sense of loneliness, of semi-real-life in the place where you live at the moment and semi-virtual life in your home country. My parents know exactly how my room and my living room looks like, although they have never been here. We have a routine of meetings, which take place every time in the same space: two rooms, the same background and the same objects around.
I can have proper meetings with old friends, drinking a cup of tea together, but in reality, we are sitting miles and miles away. No sense of distance. Or maybe just an illusion of closeness. I am wondering how other people leave the same experience. If they feel uncomfortable as well, realizing the weird situation of not-being-there but still-being-in-their-lives (the ones of the beloved people far away).
Sometimes I would like to cut everything. Forget the opportunity of being able to keep in touch with them. Cutting all the bridges. I know that I would still find them there when I need them, but the most scaring feeling is that I still need them right now, in my daily life and in my routine.
Two lives: one in the north of England, the other one in the center of Italy, but also some short excursion in Iceland, Brazil or Holland. A collage of imaginary places, where I lose the sense of what I am, of what I am doing and what I am looking for.
What I am wondering is if I am still able to be alone.
