I decided to go and visit my best friend from my high school years, one of those friends one sees or calls once every 10-12 months and it’s as if no time has passed. We spent our teenage and young adult years putting up the bricks of our relationship and now it’s solid and we know each other to the core, even if the pulp has changed, our skins got different and with more tattoos. My left leg says  “probably” and this is the answer I would give if somebody would ask me “is Chiara still your best friend?”. They usually don’t ask. 

This year she, along with us all, is turning 30. I had mentioned some months ago that I would have visited her and so here I am, at Berlin airport to make her a surprise after I told her that I couldn’t: it was the same day of a fashion show at university where I would have showed the cow horn strap-on I have spent the past two months making. I cancelled the show ‘cause who gives a fuck in the end, and I bought the ticket thinking that coming on Friday would be nicer, that I could spend one extra day with her. 

So here I am, it’s Friday the 19th of July 2024, leaving the airport for the second time today and getting ready to go there again tomorrow morning. I checked in at 2AM after remaining awake to work for hours and then playing an absolutely mindless game on my iPad for one hour. I think I’m getting depressed or maybe it’s my burnout biting me in the ass. These past few months of working have left me without thoughts and only with fingers able to scroll and scroll and scroll towards my death, while many people tell me how talented and interesting I am. If only they knew how flavourless my life feels and how little my mind enjoys things. With this, I wake up after only five hours of sleep, dreading packing my backpack and the fact that I have to bring both my computer and my iPad to work there. My back will be heavy with deadlines. I take the small and lightweight analog camera, while I try to void myself of any desire of looking good by taking the three shirts that are suitable for 38 degrees weather and I prepare myself mentally for the taste in my salty sweat. 

As I leave I look at myself in the mirror and I think that my friends in Italy are so beautiful, why does it always happen that I gain a bit of weight before I go back? Why does it always happen that my mind and my body revert to the dysmorphic feelings I felt during my teenage years. I have decided to love myself, the same way love becomes a decision after the period of being in love, a period I only experienced when mixed with so much beautiful pain. I really do hope he’s doing well. 

With this I keep walking to the train station, a backpack full of work and empty of clothes. I check the Ryanair app to see the 110€ ticket I bought. I also spent something to offset carbon emissions on a more trustworthy site than the one owned by a “low fare made simple” company. I earn some money now, thanks to my burnout, so here I am donating to Ukraine and to Palestine and to the funds against police violence and to try and save the climate from total collapse and from the extinction of human and animal species with my 25€. You are welcome. 

I open the app and it tells me my trip is not in between “my trips”, but my boarding pass is still there so I don’t worry. Must be an error. I don’t board on the wrong train so everything is going very smoothly for my standards until I’m at the airport, where it buzzes with people in a way that is different from usual. There are more people sleeping and sitting around before security than usual, but I don’t care, as I have a flight to catch and funnily enough I think that I’ve never missed a flight, which is quite an accomplishment for me.  

Very good, Luvi, get ready to think about what to say to the security people who are gonna answer to you in English when I’ve spoken to them in a grammarly-good-enough German and I feel a certain pride in thinking how I’ve actually managed to grasp this damn language, even if my accent still sounds French somehow. Which is funny ‘cause I usually am recognised as Italian not even after one word I pronounce. As I approach the terminal 2 entry (which you can also get to from terminal one, so don’t get fooled) I see way too many people standing outside and waiting entry and way too much police denying entry, so I go talk with this blonde policewoman who clearly doesn’t want to answer all these people’s questions and who tells me that there’s no access to the gates and that all flights until 14 have probably been cancelled.  

I check again the Ryanair app and I see that there is a bug somewhere? My mom calls me so I try to answer when my phone refuses to connect. She wants to tell me that she showed my video to a family friend who is a director and who was mesmerised by it. I mention that I’m at the airport and she tells me that, oh right, she didn’t think that the Microsoft problem would have affected me. I am confused and I start to look at the screens that show that every Ryanair flight has been cancelled, I see lots of cameras around me and I realize that today is an extraordinary day where a big part of society has stopped functioning. 

I’m still seeing myself in the torrid heat of the beaches around Rome and I’m not ready to grasp the concept that there’s a worldwide IT outage for the installation of an antivirus. It is not a cyberattack and the CEO of the cybersecurity company that caused all of this has said that he’s sorry for what’s happening. I check The Guardian ‘cause I’m a cool leftist and then I go to the BBC while I think that I should stop because of the way they mishandle headlines when in relation to Gaza. How do I disentangle myself from propaganda, I think, while I imagine what it means to be this CEO today: the amount of pressure must be oceanic. 

How do I feel being part of history as one of the millions little dots that connect the words “Fragile, handle with care” on top of this cardboard box? I am undecided whether to buy a cold airport sandwich for 1000€ or some overcooked airport pasta for 2000€. I decide on the sandwich as I go to try to talk with Easyjet to see if I can buy a very expensive, last-minute flight at 14, hopeful that I will get a big refund from all this. I don’t put the plastic lid on my bad coffee cup ‘cause I’m saving the planet and so I walk around with a heightened awareness of my right hand and of how my sandwich is in a paper bag that I don’t know how to open while walking.  

After being cut in line three times by middle aged German men, I manage to ask Easyjet about that flight, which at this moment is represented by a balding man who asks me “Deutsch? English?”. He tells me, auf Deutsch bitte, that if it’s sold out on the website it can’t be bought there either. Ok, danke, as I leave and check whether the eight policemen and women, (policepeople?) are still barring the entry of my terminal, which they are. There are so many people waiting outside and I feel superior to them because I choose to wait inside terminal 1, where the AC reigns unbothered, instead of queuing for what will be 4 hours under the scorching Sun. 

I am in contact with Laura for this surprise. She is trying to search for alternative flights with me, all for at least 250€ with no actual possibility of buying them because of this very late millennium bug. I am thankful for her, for Rose, who’s on the side of a swimming pool checking in on me, and for my mom, who allows me to call her and vent always a bit too much. She sends me a photo of Belfast airport, where they’re using a big paper board and a pen to update flights information, and I think this is actually quite poetic, somehow, and I’m enjoying it. I’m afraid we’re gonna have to pay for the consequences of this chaos, and that Bill Gates, even if he loses a lot of money of his “a lot of money”, will still have a lot of money. What a fragile system we have built: all interconnected and held together with gaffer tape. What they taught us at informatic engineering “if it’s stupid, but it works, it is not stupid” and this whole sentence takes a new meaning. Apparently banks aren’t working, nor some health structures. 911 has stopped functioning in some parts of Australia and here I am, at an airport trying to catch a flight that is both very important and completely meaningless. 

I wonder how we got here and how this is gonna go, if this is yet another visible step of our imminent fall.  

In the meanwhile I have been twice calling Ryanair customer service, where a recorded voice tells me that it is not their fault that everything is broken, to press 5 for a cancelled flight and that they’re sorry for the inconvenience of the cancellation, I will be put in contact with a person soon. I get reminded again and again as the hold music gets interrupted that my call is important and to hold in line. The first time a person answers I can’t hear anything and I get hung up. The second time I manage to talk with what sounds like a very stressed child who tells me that I can change my flight for no extra expense as soon as the systems go back online, which might be tonight or maybe even tomorrow. My phone has only 20%, so I search for a charging station to recharge the battery of what feels like a bug more than a feature. I end up sitting on the floor talking with this Italian woman who’s also trying to go back to Rome with her flight of 18. She works for Mercedes and is already there ‘cause she checked out of her hotel early. Her face, that I think has been slightly too long under the lights of a tanning bed, reminds me a bit of something ancient and I wonder if she’s one of those people with a bit of Neanderthal DNA in them. I draw a bit for my presentation on Tuesday. 

I ponder my options and after trying (or better, failing) at buying some other tickets for a flight that gets cancelled anyway, I actually decide to go home and wait for Ryanair to get back online. I tell Laura, who seems sad, and I start to ask myself whether I’m doing all of this for her. As I step on the S46 I remember that I have to sit on the other side to avoid having the sun on my face, forgetting that the train has changed direction and so here I am again blinded by it. 

Outside of the window a field: I marvel at the flowers and I suddenly realise that they are not affected by this outage. The world buzzes, companies are losing money by the barrel and there is probably a bee feeding itself of nectar. Unbothered. In which way does the soil feel what is happening to the earth? Is it getting watered by all these salty tears that haven’t been wept yet? Do deers perceive that a collapse is imminent, as their ears flap to detect possible threats? Do whales know that the CO2 concentration is higher than what it was? Or are we all like that frog that gets used to the temperature of water slowly rising until boiling? 

I check my step counter: the stress of my day has roughly the same number of steps of a holiday day in nature. The sunset is beautiful from this train and I think that maybe even just this made this day worth it.