August 27th
When Laura meets Nina at the café where they’ve set up for the interview, she thinks: she’s cool. She can see it in her eyes, even if they are a little tired. Laura always trusts her instinct, despite being a twenty-four year old, she can feel it thanks to a sort of wise old lady who lives inside her, to whom she can always refer.
After just a few pleasantries, as Laura likes, she understands that Nina is slightly older than her, but with a completely different life. She mentions children. From the questions she has prepared, she discovers that Nina is an architect, who’s ended up, or rather stuck, in the fashion world, for which she has a lot of passion but which was not exactly her dream.
While they are talking, a message arrives on Laura’s phone: “As soon as you return to Milan, call me”. She rolls her eyes and Nina interrupts her speech. “Sorry, ignore it,” they smile. “It’s my mother, who sometimes decides to be a mother”.
It’s her prerogative having no filters, even with strangers. But only when the wise old lady trusts who she’s talking to, otherwise she doesn’t let anything pass. After a second of silence, that second in which she decides what to do, by looking at her interlocutor’s eyes, Nina says, smiling with a sweet confidence: “You don’t know how much I can relate”.
At 5.30pm Laura gets to her car to drive back to Milan, plugs in her phone and clicks play. The music starts. And as she whizzes along the highway, she thinks back to the hours spent at that table in a café. How similar one can be even when living completely different lives, and how much the wise old lady inside her still has to teach her about the infinite thread binding daughters and mothers.
Continues.
