This short tale is ispired by the famous song from Lucio Dalla “Anna e Marco”.

Anna had lost hope in the future. She could not imagine other  than living a life chasing happiness without ever reaching it.

She felt special, and knew she was. But her essence, desire to show her  abilities, clashed with the everyday life, where the artist’s ambitions crashed against the rocks of basic needs, bills to pay, empty plates on which to put something.

She wanted to live thanks to her art, singing, but instead found herself surviving thanks to the art she had to learn: how to survive.

She paid with her body the desire for independence, selling it to men who did not have the right even to look at her, but which violated her every night. Better to sell yourself to a man, rather than to subdue to him. Anna thought of it in this way. She was forced to repeat this to herself every day.

Not wanting to go back, to surrender, to submit to the yoke of those who would eternally remember her choices in life.

Nonetheless, she would not even go on that  path. That was not life, but just a dramatic survival.

.

Every morning, Marco was closing the door behind him,  going out without any goal, since anything he could find outside of these walls would be better than what he had left there.

The friends from the bar were the only comfort, but also the trap in which he had found himself in.

He was getting used to their presence, while thirst  to feel part of something, to share desires and wishes with someone, transformed a group of deadbeats with no dreams in his only opportunity to socialize.

Work was hard to come, and he had to make do with small things often at the limit of legality, just to scrape together the  minimum for a drink or a night out on the dance floor.

Marco did not want to continue like this, and often wondered if it was better to live this way, no expectations, or quit the game forever. He asked himself that question every day.

.

Anna and Marco met by a stroke of life , in a ballroom. She was shy and timid, sat in the company of a friend. He was dancing as if trying to release a demon from his body.

She looked at him and smiled. He met her eyes, first with embarrassment, then smiled as well.

That day they started dating, and friendship turned into something deeper. They spoke of their problems and frustrations. But they also planned together and imagined their future. A future in  pair.

Anna and Marco knew that they couldn’t turn their lives around  in few days, at the same time rejoiced because the will to live was back.

They gathered their few belongings and fled from that place and what it represented. They prepared to face a long journey together, towards the place called dream.