The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Before the elevator doors closed, Alice and Mattia exchanged a good-bye that meant nothing at all.

Mattia felt the veins in his neck swelling. Perhaps he was about to cry.

Ever since that afternoon in the park the tears were always there, like a lump that was hard to swallow, as if that day his tear ducts, clogged for so long, had finally opened and all that accumulated stuff had finally begun to force its way out.

Mattia had crossed his big toe over his second one, inside his slipper, and by squashing one over the other and against the floor he hoped he could break them

Alice kept the music turned up, but if when she got there someone had asked her what she was listening to, she wouldn’t have been able to say

He was no longer jealous of Alice, there was no point, but at that moment it was as if an undigested bit of the past had come back up his throat.

Mattia’s voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

He had learned to respect the chasm that Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over that chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void.

They spoke only rarely, mostly on the phone, and were capable of being silent for minutes at a time, each lost in his own thoughts, punctuated by the other’s reassuring, rhythmical breathing at the other end of the line.

feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build for himself