Eva Colombo, Means of escape, second chapter: Eva ( inspired by The Rolling Stones song Ventilator Blues )
 
It’s the morning twilight. Soon everything will run, everything will scream. Soon the breath – taking morning will force anyone to rush anywhere and there would be no place for you, no air for you. Me will be the only one who will stop listening to your curses: you will curse everyone who is used to take the air away from you, everyone who lives running frantically after the sun and while running tramples down the flowers that at dawn close their corolla.
“Woman’s cussing, you can hear her scream / Feel like murder in the first degree”
Later you would repent having cursed. At sunset you will go among the trees, near the water. You will listen to the shuffle of a cat drinking from the river and you will ask forgiveness. Looking at the tree – tops you will say without voice that you hate nobody, that you wish only to stay alive. Among the trees, at sunset, you will pray so that the horror of the following morning wouldn’t crush you down, wouldn’t kill you.
“Ain’t nobody slowing down no way / Everybody’s stepping on their accelerator / Don’t matter where you are / Everybody’s going to need a ventilator”
You have encircled your eyes with the black kajal, you have slipped on the black - leather boots. You are gone outside. Now you are among the trees, near the water. It’s the evening twilight. The traffic’s noise is so intense that you can hardly hear water’s gurgling. Now you feel pity, you feel pity for them. For those that run after the sun, for those that don’t know the night being necessary as well. Obviously, not the night known by them: that weak, unarmed night put on the ropes by their artificial lights and their din to end crushed by the boulder of their sleep. No. The night needed by your soul is that night powerful enough to work miracles: disclosing flowers corollas, enabling human beings to see the stars. You need to stare her into the eyes, with that black as the night eyes of yours. Every evening you wonder at her returning since you’ve been left alone to welcome her. But even you can’t stay with her a long time. Soon, too soon you have to go back home. At each step you breath the night, and you live. At each step you feel tears mounting to your eyes because the shuffle of the golden autumnal leaves under your boots recalls to you that the gold is too often forced to transmute itself into mud in order to survive. Because that shuffle recalls to you another painful thing: soon the air will be taken away from you again by those that run after the sun, those used to trample down a woman of your kind.
“When you’re trapped and circled with no second chances / Your code of living is your gun in hand”
Now it’s the evening twilight and you’re staring at your face mirrored in the river. Now you can hear me, listen to me. You feel trapped, you’re actually trapped. But you’re in possess of weapons as well, weapons that should be proved very effective for your self – defense. Recall your name, recall its meaning. It means living, it means breathing: your essence it’s the life itself, the very air indispensable for living. You welcome the night, you’re used to stare the night into the eyes without fear: you know that air could become storm, you know that life could assume an aspect so terrifying that you would regret being born. You know this, and yet you go on living. You know this, and yet you go on breathing. Those that trample down you are scared by these things, they don’t want to hear them. So you’ve got to write them. Yes: write these things in many languages, in many ways. Trace around your soul a magic circle of written words: your enemies wouldn’t dare to cross it, they wouldn’t dare to trample down you anymore.
“Don’t matter where you are, everybody, everybody’s going to / Need some kind of ventilator”
Burst by running after the sun, sooner or later you enemies will stop beside you to take breath. They will go round you reading the words that protect your soul and they will feel that those words blow right on their faces the air they need, the life they need. And they will let you live, and they will let you breath. Don’t matter where you are: you will be, anyway.