Lift from the Beginning

Love was a surviving myth, which was always hit-and-miss.

It was the welcome day. Thousands of students, every kind of newcomers, would assemble in a small auditorium which could barely accommodate them, hoping to gather some useful information and making friends. Looking around endlessly, pretensions, feigned interests, nervous excitements, millions of enchanté and je ne parle pas français...

I would have never attended such a thing unless I was not in a foreign city where I had arrived only a week ago by then, where I had to survive at least until the end of that year, and where I had no idea whether I could. Yet I was, so I decided to leave my dorm room at that morning.

I waited for a lift that morning too. There were only two very small lifts in my building, and hundreds of residents, who shared the same situation. A lift came up, came down, stopped, opened, closed, then descended to rez-de-chaussée, and I was still on my floor, the fifth. I could have walked down, but for some reason, I kept waiting. After a few more unfriendly encounters with my new colleagues, I finally found a spot and got on. Yet it stopped once more and opened again on next floor. I saw the blue shirts, black hair, then full red lips. The blue shirts, after momentarily hesitating, got on the crowded lift, headed to the door and showed me the back of the head. Then all got off, people rushed into the arriving tram, and I, for some reason again, gave up to run and stopped.

So lifted the curtain. Iphigenia and Frankenstein came out for a bow. Mais encore, I clapped until the very end,