BARE

One evening, a friend of my father came to our house in tears. Sitting desolate in an armchair in the living room, surrounded by my parents, she looked at me—I must have been twelve—and said, “you know, whoever we are, in the end, we are bare.” She had just lost her husband, a prominent figure in the region, much like herself. After a life of parade and ostentatious appearances, he had succumbed to a particularly cruel and painful cancer. I remember feeling neither shocked nor surprised, neither by her suffering nor by her words: ”in the end, we are bare.”

I have always been indifferent to social trappings, always knowing them to be mere vanity. It is in our bareness that we are true. Elegance lies in knowing how to clothe one’s naked body in just the necessary fabric, lace, leather.Intelligence is sometimes speaking and often remaininsilent. The souls do not speak. Music is punctuated by silences. The epitome of civilization is in shades of black and white. Everything else is not just vanity, but error, fake, and the use of fake.

I despise the world as it has become since the beginning of this year 2025. I detest this world roaring with virile, boisterous, uneducated, bellowing, and menacing powers. I oppose silence to emptiness. I oppose my nudity to uniforms, to the suits that grace the oval office. I loathe all who bow before the threats of liars. To lie is to deny that we are bare. We can only love another when bare.

_ Milena Carbone