32. A Pure Formality
It had been days since I’d washed my hair. Swimming every morning gave me the illusion of cleanliness, the chlorine a kind of disguise. I ran my fingers through my hair and felt something move. A faint buzz, a crawling tremor under my scalp. I felt myself begin to panic. I pulled out my hair tie, then screamed as a cloud of insects emerged from my head.
The alarm went off.
This was how every morning started. I’d dream of the insects, before being dragged back to reality by my alarm. Then my morning swim at the neighbourhood pool, then home, then coffee, a banana, then off to work, a pack of crackers, a slice of cheese, my laptop, a paperback, everything tossed into a bag. Then I would run. Always running, until I reached my desk, ignoring traffic signals as I drove. And then I wouldn’t move for hours. That’s where I spent seventy percent of my life – sitting still, answering emails, managing rentals, pretending to be a functional adult. The other thirty percent? A collage of borrowed identities: Sara the editor of a performing-arts magazine, Sara the book reader, Sara the invisible daughter, the ghostly friend.
My life was a series of parallel planets. The planet of theatre and dance. The planet of vacation rentals. The planet of literature. The planet of music. Each with its own gravity, its own climate, its own creatures. I travelled between them like a stowaway, perfectly camouflaged. But the inhabitants of one planet never knew the others existed. Whenever I tried to mix them – say, by mentioning a choreographer to a client from North Carolina – it ended badly. So I learned to split myself, to play my parts in silence.
That morning, as usual, I was late to work. As usual, I’d dreamt of the horseflies and had woken screaming. But I’d skipped my swim.
I parked in a resident-only zone – yellow signs; a $75 fine if caught. It was cheaper than the garage. A calculated risk.
By 6:30 I’d answered fifty emails, most of them absurd. People asking whether the villa had an ice crusher, the brand espresso machine, whether the sea could be seen from the pool or only near the pool.
When I finally walked out, the air was dim and the streets were half asleep.
My car was gone.
At first, I thought it had been towed. I walked to the nearest precinct, the local DMV/Police hybrid that handled ‘vehicular irregularities’. Inside, the air smelled of old plastic and recycled breath, the universal scent of bureaucratic defeat.
They handed me a stack of forms, and a pen attached to the counter by a chain.
Name.
License plate.
Model.
Colour.
Any distinctive marks.
I filled them all, one after another, until the clerk looked up from her screen.
“Everything’s been settled, ma’am.”
“Settled?” I asked.
“The vehicle was retrieved by the owner.”
“But I am the owner,” I said.
She squinted at the monitor.
“It says here that Ms. Sara N. reclaimed the car at 5:42”
It was 6.55.
“It must be a glitch,” she added. “Check the City Portal. You’ll find the record there.”
I went home, opened my laptop, and logged in with my digital ID. The case was marked as Closed. Attached was a photo: my car, being driven away by a woman who looked exactly like me – same hair, same jacket, the same tired posture.
My hands trembled.
I opened Google Maps and checked the street. The image loaded slowly. There I was, standing beside the car, staring at my phone.
I stayed up all night looking for explanations. Every site I visited seemed to know me. A review signed with my name. A profile full of my photos but with captions I hadn’t written. A video where I read a text I’d never seen.
From then on, I started chasing myself. Every address, every lead, brought me somewhere another version of me had been.
The days blurred. I began to feel like a shadow running after its body. People looked at me oddly, as if they recognized me from a different context, a parallel life: a woman on the subway smiled at me and whispered, “Didn’t we meet last week?”; a barman told me I’d forgotten my change the previous night.
Every reflection – shop windows, bus doors, even puddles – seemed half a second out of sync, each reflecting a version of me a little more efficient, a little more alive. I would turn my head, and the woman inside the glass would turn a second later, as if tired of following orders.
At night I walked through the city, hoping to bump into myself. I imagined confronting her and asking what she’d done with my car, with my name, with the pieces of me she’d borrowed. Sometimes I thought I caught her silhouette in the distance, wearing the same coat, disappearing around a corner just as I began to run. I never caught up. I stopped swimming.
A few days later, I went to the hospital. It was the last place, I thought, where they still kept records of the living.
The woman at the front desk gave me a clipboard.
“Fill this out, please.”
I looked at her, exhausted. I’d spent days filling out forms, declarations, statements, apologies. Another one? She understood my look, the silent plea.
“It’s a pure formality,” she said gently.
I glanced down.
“Reason for admission?” was written at the top.
I hesitated for a long time, then wrote a single phrase.
I can’t find my car
Simona Cappellini is an Italian writer working at the intersection of literature, cultural observation, and the dynamics of contemporary life. With a background in both the arts and the luxury hospitality industry, her work often explores the tension between surface and depth, appearance and reality. She is the author of the novel Up To Eight and is currently developing new literary projects.