Tripping in the traffic nightmare

First posted: 19 september 2009

The car: our status symbol. What could we do without it? How could we survive without this vital transport? How much would we miss its “closeness”, its “understanding”, its “hopeless” noise, our efforts to kill ourselves darting in the middle of a country while a little old lady is crossing through the street and a child is following a ball behind her? Surely the first feeling, could be panic, followed by cold sweats, blazes, loneliness and depression.


Obviously, without car, we can’t follow our son to school because the building is too far: after all, 300metres are endless, during this terrible and hard path we also might stumble or take a tile on our head. Going to shopping, in such a condition, it’s impossible: it’s better if we start to live with “bread and water” (thanks to the bakery under our house) or, instead, we could try to use internet and our credit card even tough we have always been against those strange devices.
We might go to the gym and solarium, or pool… absolutely not, or yes, or not, or yes … and here it comes an illumination, because the needs to lose weight to be more sturdy and then, in our opinion, to be more accepted in our society and at ease with ourselves, it pushes us to discover that there are other types of transportation (and not only our car): buses, metros, scooters, bicycles, and something that we couldn’t even image, our legs.


Slowly, forced by all this situation, you’ll realize that it’s not so bad: you’ll also feel lighter and more in shape after a bike ride or a walk. The stress traffic disappears: those horns, the process of being in a hurry heading out of the mess and that never-ending quest for a free parking vanished, leaving us a sense of ethereal peace (caused, probably, thanks to the Prozac, that we took because of the depression caused by our being without cars, to whom we sooner or later get addicted).
We’ll feel like Heidi surrounded by goats and we’ll skip along the main street of our city enthralled by the sense of new freedom, just tasted, and finding the same traffic cars on the sidewalk: hellish pedestrians walking like in a funeral, people watching from all sides and coming out from the shops who bump against us, and your desire it’s just to run away from that but it’s impossible: there is no escape but only the chance to cover us in some shop or in our apartment that is too far from our actual position.


We’ll try in vain to jump on a overflow bus to be able to enter there (long live to sardines!), we’ll look around disoriented and we’ll start to think about our lovable car: the place where nobody can stand on us or scream in our ears, and where we could stay sit down to shout against the world.
We’ll feel like dieing because of a slight panic attack, you will begin to run desperately to the only spot where, we are thinking, the oxygen passes, we fall down to the ground without forces, completely submerged by the city traffic and while trying to breathe, that mouthful of air, people, attracted by our illness, will gather together around us to see, understand, take an interest in … and you are left breathless, we’ll wake up in our bed, soaked, cursing the night before when we had the fantastic idea of trying an acid to relax.