The story of my quarantine is somehow unlikely. I used to live in Brescia, in Lombardy, but a couple of years ago I moved to Padua to attend university. My boyfriend stayed in Brescia all along and this situation got me going back and forth every weekend and basically anytime I could in order to see him. Finally, this winter we decided to move to Padua together, after he spent two months in Germany for his studies. We were extremely lucky since he could come back safely before things spiraled. For all the time he was gone I couldn’t wait, I would think all the time that this year would be our year and I was looking forward to this spring, our first months together in our own house, far from home, making friends and living our lives.
We moved to the new house on March 1st, and after just a few days they called the quarantine. That’s how my dream-spring got somehow ruined. I’m glad to say we never had a single argument throughout this month of grounding and, at least, I got the chance to be quarantined with the person I most love and want to be with. I keep thinking how incredibly lucky we have been, getting the chance of moving in here together instead of being kept separate in two different countries.
Only problem is, since we just moved here, we have very few things to distract ourselves with. We both are “literary people”, we both study Languages and Literature and we are crazy about books. We got this habit of reading books together, since the very first time we dated. We take turns reading while the other just listens or does something else, like cooking or cleaning. This is how we share our interests, we comment every passage and I assure you it’s better than watching a show together. The vast majority of our books are at our parents’ houses, in fact, we thought we would have plenty of chances to take them here bit by bit. At the time we are reading whatever we can put our hands on, thank God Amazon still ships books.
We have so much time and we read so many books that some days ago we even thought we could try and write one on our own. Like every other student, we are also having online classes and we happen to be attending a Victorian Literature class together, mainly focused on crime. At the same time, we just finished a book about a case of murder during the II World War, solved by a German coronel. So one day my boyfriend asks me “what do you think makes a great crime story?” and starting from that we kept discussing about it and writing down some plot lines and ideas. We came up with this woman becoming the assistant of a detective but actually being the murderer of the story. She was raped as a girl and she now wants justice. But killing the abuser is certainly not catchy enough for a crime story, so we decided to take her revenge to the next level, having her kill every witness or accomplice. We are still discussing the matter – ad of course I just made a giant spoiler so we might think about changing it all – but we thought about four victims: the abuser, a middle school or high school professor to whom she confessed seeking help but that ultimately did nothing, a neighbor who caught a glimpse of the fact but decided to keep his mouth shut, and finally a cop she went to years later that just dropped any charge. We even made some research because we would like her to kill the victims like a man would kill a woman. We looked up on the internet the general features of femicides and we found out that there is actually a pattern: women usually get stabbed with kitchen knives, since they are the closest weapon the man can reach when he gets the impulse, and, to be sure, they are usually also strangled with a chord or with the man’s bare hands. We are still figuring out whether to give her a sort of signature, to link her to women’s violence, yet we don’t want to make it too clear who the murderer is. Not sure whether to hope it will be over soon or it will last long enough for us to make up our minds about the book.
And that’s’ basically our life in quarantine: books and love.
Dea
