A LIGHT VEIL – 4

Ants

As I pour some wine in her paper glass, the wind touches our hair softly, in a gentle way, as an announcement of the upcoming end of Summer. It’s just the two of us here in the park, we’re a couple of small dots on a large green brush stroke. We argued a bit while we were on holiday, so I thought that a last-minute picnic could be appreciated. I made some sandwiches, I bought a cake, I went to pick her up (in the end, even if she will never admit it, she likes this kind of surprises).

I personally chose the point where to eat, and I started to lay down a big FILA towel: as I flattened its folds on the ground, I saw her looking at me, laughing, I think she found that vision of me funny.

I pour some wine in her paper glass trying to talk smart – that’s another thing that makes her smile.

– ‘Do you remember Enduring Love by Ian McEwan?’.
– ‘No, I don’t’.
– ‘It’s not possible, we also watched the movie, do you remember it? The one with Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton, it took me the entire night to set the right subtitles’.
– ‘Oh, yes, I feel asleep on the couch’.
– ‘Right’.
– ‘You are the one who reads, you know it. What is the book about? Why should I remember about it?’ she asks while eating bread and butter.
– ‘Because it starts right with a picnic. It’s the story of an Engligh couple having a picnic in the park; at a certain moment they witness a hot-air balloon falling down. They save the life of a psychopath from it, and by doing that their lives are never going to be the same again’.
– ‘Would you love to see our afternoon interrupted and compromised by a crazy man driving a balloon?’ she asks me laughing.
– ‘No, I don’t’ I reply ‘it just came up to my mind’. I pour some more wine.
She holds my hand, the wind is breath that tastes green.
– ‘I don’t know why you live with this feeling to amaze me all the time. The books your read, the movies you watched…Sometimes living is much easier’.

A gust moves up the only piece of fabric I couldn’t fix to the ground. Under it, a bunch of ants, a bundle of black dots climbing our sandwiches.
‘Damn!’ I say, trying to save everything I can. But once she stops me and takes my hand: her eyes, her smiling eyes, invite me to see that show. A bunch of ants attacking everything I prepared for that the afternoon.
There’s nobody here in the park, just the two of us, two small dots in the green. The ants are a living banquet under our eyes: we observe them eating, we hold each other.