I passionately hate the ambulance sirens. I haven’t always been like that. I always disliked alarms – of cars, of houses, of hotels. When the alarm in my newly purchased apartment, several years ago, went off in the middle of the night, I left home because I panicked.
But with the ambulances, I started to have issues in 2010, when I was running with my car, behind the ambulance in which my father was. It was a road from which he never returned.
The last year has stubbornly given me many opportunities to relive those feelings I had in 2010. It’s like in the movie Groundhog Day: every day there are more opportunities for my emotional memory to reactivate. The hardest part is when I’m behind the wheel, at an intersection; you can hear the noise but you can’t see the car; it can come from anywhere; luckily, in those moments I tend to get on autopilot a bit, I don’t freeze up.
I hope my Groundhog Day has an end too. One in which not only I won’t visit the past this much but also in which there will be fewer, much fewer sirens. After all, what is a wave, as the wave passes.