Oh yeah, my regular tired Thursdays… My alarm clock rang at 6 am but I … I definitely wasn’t going to wake up at that time…It was 8 when I did. Shoot! I was going to go to KVR, the foreigners’ office to take my residence permit today. I quickly got dressed, gathered my documents together. I was telling Fabio “you give food to cats” he asked me if I wanted coffee. I said “yes, quick”. In the meantime I gave food to cats, cleaned their litter, and Fabio was still cleaning his machine and smashing coffee, I think it took him 10 minutes to make me an espresso. I told him “I told you I needed quick, I am late”, he said “Relax baby, you will do it.”. I was very tempted not to go, I would wake up early tomorrow and go there before they open the office. And then I said “what if?” and went.
I took the U-bahn and had to get on a bus. The bus was in 6 minutes, I was outside, there was a nice breeze and I felt very alive. There was “Roadtrippin with my two favourite allies…” song playing in my head and I started moving, exploring movements of my hands. Then I stretched my legs, I wanted to dance, but I kept itsmall with the hands and arms only (internal social pressure). When I got on the bus, I heard a guy talking on the phone in English. He was telling that the municipality office that I was heading to was going to move to a new location close to his place. I did not know that it will move. I wanted to turn back and tell him “I just overheard you speaking about the office, where will it move?” but then I stopped myself (internal social pressure). I thought he might think I am not respectful of his privacy or he might think I use this question as an excuse to meet him and hit on him or he would hit on me. So many prejudices, assumptions in my head.. and I could hear these sentences with particular voices, voices of people in my life. But I am not them, I am me. I should have gone ahead and ask. Whatever happened, I could manage. And in the best case, i could make someone feel better, feel connected and sate my curiosity.
When I arrived to KVR and went to the location where residence permits are handed, I took a waiting number from the ticketing machine. I noticed there was another number on the top of the machine that had today’s date. It was three numbers less from mine. So I took it too. The numbers on the board was appearing one after the other but without a proper order. I thought if this other number I took would appear, would I get up and go to the room? No. Because it might be a number for the other applications. There were three buttons on the ticketing machine, who knows which one of them that number corresponded. I put the number in my bag and in 5 minutes this number flashed on the board. I did not go.