Prologue

This afternoon, at the gift shop,

I was watching the people who work around me.

The ticket booth lady, the security guard, the coffee girl, the cook.

And they all seemed so solid, so real.

I was wondering that they wake up every day and go to work,

to do whatever it is that they do.

And that is their lives.

Nothing is yet to be.

Because everything already is.

I felt so distant from all of that.

They just are, while I keep thinking all the time

that I have yet to become.

An actress – and a famous one, preferably –, financially independent, emotionally impartial,

self-assured, capable, slim, great personality, kind, cool, politically correct,

and in favor of recyclable bags.

Oh, yes, and have a Plan B.

I always forget about Plan B,

because for me Plan B was to stick to Plan A.

The idea that I’m not there yet,

I’m still getting there,

I didn’t make it,

That I am yet to be,

becoming,

the idea that my life is yet to begin, drains me.

“What will I be??”

Is the question that doesn’t seem to have an answer

but somehow it keeps being asked.

And I know that nothing is going to happen with my life,

because it is already happening,

and half of the time I’m waiting to be something that I might never be,

or that I might be already, but unaware of.

Sometimes I have the most insane thoughts:

I picture myself running away to a small bucolic town,

getting a job, just any job at a random place, and just holding on to whatever I can.

If I can get health insurance, great!

Otherwise, I just will not get sick.

I will live where I can and out of whatever is possible.

I will accept that maybe I will never go to New York,

That unlike my sister, my cousins and some of my friends,

I will never buy my own place and will forever be someone’s tenant.

I guess I am tired of feeling hopeful, that’s all. Motivation is quite an exhausting task, especially when self-motivation is not enough and one needs to motivate others saying that everything will work out fine, or each person has a different timing, and “my time will come…”.

You know what? I don’t know if it will work out.

I have no idea whether this is a tie-break, and the match point will be mine.

I am letting go of all my expectations about myself and diverting everyone else’s away.

I just want to be someone who lives, breathes, wakes up and works, like a regular, ordinary person. And if someone asks:

“What about Fabiana, how is she doing?”, in that lower, solemn tone, people can say whatever comes to mind, feel free to fill the blank, but don’t ask me about my plans, neither A nor B, especially because there was never a Plan B.

And if my parents could not help me anymore, that is totally fine.

Hey, here is what we can do: I can write a letter releasing them of all parental responsibility:

“I, hereby, declare that my parents have given me everything that a daughter could ever want. They helped me financially until I reached a mature age – yes, I’ll say it again, a quite mature age –, therefore, they are free from any and all obligation they may believe they have towards me, as of this date”.

I release everyone.

Especially myself.

After writing this, at the end of a hard day at work, that I have taken the first step towards getting the stories for this book together, and weather I like it or not, they are connected with my own story.

I never wanted to write anything about myself, and maybe that guy Mark Zuckerberg did actually encourage me with that Facebook thing, because it gives a person such a wide reach, but to my own delight, it does not have a “Couldn’t care less button” yet.

My audacity in writing would not be as bold if that functionality were to exist.

But one day, maybe drunk from the boredom of a day without much to do,

and feeling strongly affected by the relentless artistic anemia

that struck me more often than not, I started to write.

No aspirations whatsoever.

No illusion as to the reason behind it.

It was just a way to drain my artistic vein.

That was how it happened.

A regular day. At the Gift Shop. It just happened. I started writing.

Then I realized it happened quite frequently,

even when the emptiness of the day seemed overwhelming,

even when silence prevailed.

So, I started to take time and really look

at this great big subjective and concrete world

that I could see from behind the counter,

and think that, maybe, that counter contained an audience

and the life I could witness from behind it was the stage.

And perhaps,

By irony or a whim of destiny,

life had staged me in a different way,

for the moment,

so that I could write the story

instead of enacting it.

At the Gift Shop did not start as an actual beginning of anything.

It started exactly because it was already happening.

Maybe just as life itself,

and the illusion we get from believing that something needs to happen,

that something amazingly fantastic

is always about to happen,

so that then, and only then,

we can start living.

The truth is that

the only thing about to happen is the next moment.

It is the understanding that the river runs its course

and it will not stop for us

to get in and start sailing.