I don't know when I notice that P hasn't responded to the WhatsApp I sent him, I don't remember when either. How strange, I say to myself, and continue to my things. P is an old friend who lives in northern Europe, I never know in which city because he practices a nomadism between impulsive and work, which takes him from Trieste to Berlin or Milan. An avant-garde architect and sailboat helmsman, one foot in the solid and the other in the liquid, he once designed a theater on water. To know what waters and in what was the thing. But he has always been ahead of his time; the first, for example, who spoke of a computer or a mobile, when the rest of us ate peanuts, to understand each other.
How strange, I repeat myself weeks later, so long without an answer. And now yes, I stop my steps on a corner in the big city and rewind two meters of WhatsApp until I find my greeting without answering. And without receiving, I see, that is, with a single check. He will be with the sailboat on a long voyage, I tell myself in a hurry. At night I stare at that gray message, hanging, deaf, with a single gray dove. He will be sailing around the world, I tell myself to sleep, and I imagine him maneuvering the winds in the wide blue sea.
I write to one of his various e-mail addresses and continue with my life from here to there, with the fly in his ear that the days go by and he does not respond. I don't want to even begin to touch on the possibility that something has happened to him. Will he be very sick? Something worse? I put the idea aside because I don't feel capable of facing another personal catastrophe in this year of loss. Nor is there time to sob well. I advance in things, I continue my days with the shadow of his silence. Every night I come home and I don't dare to put his name on Google and let the fatal news chill my blood.
Last night I decided to endure what had to be. I brace myself, take a deep breath, press the phone, and dial her number. Now a broken relative will answer, I think. Or I will hear that this cell phone is off, out of coverage at the bottom of the sea. But as soon as I hear my friend's warm voice say my name, I realize that he has simply, once again, been ahead of his time. I'm sorry for thinking you're dead, I tell him, when surely all you've done is leave WhatsApp, because you've always been the smartest. Well, he says without irony, nobody is on WhatsApp anymore. I don't ask what world he lives in. WhatsApp was for slaves, he clarifies, we all realized it a long time ago and ran away from it.
