SOCKS

By: Albana Beqiri

Before going shopping for Christmas gifts, Alma K. told herself that this year, at least this year, she would give up the permanent habit of buying socks. This habit, which she insisted (only in her mind) that she had to get rid of, had turned into madness; she'd been telling herself the same thing for years and ended up coming home with a dozen socks that, when she opened her shopping bags, seemed to laugh at all the other gifts. Then Alma seemed to hear their voices in their not-so-unfair bragging of the other gifts, saying, “You just look like shopping for seasonal fashions, while we, oh we're the permanent choice of Mrs. Alma. We don't know why, we don't know why we deserved this obsession of hers for us, but we know it's been like this for years. She never gets tired of buying us"!

– Like why the hell do you have this obsession with buying socks, endless socks? - this was the question asked by Mario, the husband who just arrived home with bags full of gifts among which, like every other year, there were also a dozen socks of all colors and patterns that he had found in the large shopping center where years of shopping.

For a moment it remained, it was found very close, Alma K.; she was not prepared for the answer that her husband would give her because she never thought that she would have to give him an answer. He had seen her buying socks for years; everywhere in the drawers of the house she found dozens of socks packed and never opened, but she had never asked why she was so obsessed with socks. He had always pretended not to notice this completely incomprehensible obsession of his wife, so Alma realized that he must have gone too far with those damn socks, until he stepped out of his comfort zone and couldn't take it anymore. for himself the curiosity that he was taking maybe for years.

What to say to him?

Once she thought of inventing some kind of answer, not alla Albanian, but from Western ones with some kind of complex that she didn't know how to explain and that Mario, being an Italian, would understand her better and maybe he would advise her to go to a psychoanalyst. Maybe she really needed to see a psychoanalyst, otherwise how could she curb her uncontrollable mania to buy only socks? Even when he went to buy bread, he managed to direct himself a few meters away to one of those shops that sold everything from sewing needles to bed sheets, where socks seemed the most common and normal commodity of all. most of the other assortments are unrelated to each other. Away from the world that surprisingly existed even without her sock problem, Alma was lost in her own thoughts. It was her husband's voice that reminded her of this.

- Okay, dear, I understand that maybe you don't have an answer, but I would beg you not to buy any more socks, at least not me. I have enough to last me two more human lives and I also believe it would be good to see a psychoanalyst - of course she was tired of waiting for her answer, so not to prolong it even for her going towards any possible quarrel had given him dum with these two requests - suggestions.

Although he had expected this job of going to a psychoanalyst, Alma suddenly laughed, made no effort to hold back his laughter, and burst out loud. She laughed so hard and so long, she laughed so uncontrollably and unconsciously that, if it weren't for the surprised portrait of Mario in front of her, she might have continued to laugh even more without realizing what she was doing. In order not to offend him, he now had to explain to the stunned Mario that her laughter had nothing to do with him or his demands; she had laughed only because she remembered her mother, that small woman, but agile and hardworking like an ant, who, if she had been there listening, would have said to her: "My little cuckoo, what black psychoanalyst are you talking about?" We didn't even know what a psychologist or psychoanalyst is and here we are: normal people with our troubles and pains, but normal. With a burden of troubles on our backs, with great poverty, but with a lot of love, we managed to raise you by doing the best for you. What happens now? You, who lack nothing, are fed up with these psychoanalysts and your absurd complaints about depression, or whatever the hell you say."

Mario continued to see her full of amazement and Alma realized that for her husband, an Italian who had really fallen in love with an Albanian woman, but who did not know the Albanian mentality at all, everything that had happened or was happening in the small country on the other side of the Adriatic, was only an interesting exotic. Maybe the time had come to have a real conversation which could at least enlighten the surprised Italian.

- My dear, if he was here he would have laughed at the two of us talking about psychoanalysts or hidden complexes that the psychoanalyst should reveal to us. She lived in a country where there were neither psychologists, nor trade unionists, nor even lawyers. For example, if you had lived in Albania during the years of communism, you would not have been a lawyer, because the communist rulers thought that people did not need lawyers, because they were protected by the party... Absurd, isn't it? Maybe your mind can't grasp the psychology of people who grew up in dictatorships, but that's how it was. We had nothing, least of all freedom. My parents, whom you know as two honorable people, they really are, because their life was based on honesty. They raised and educated us as children on those principles, despite the fact that shortages and poverty were the binomial of our lives. And when I talk about poverty, it was all-round, not just material. We believe, everything was missing, even the socks. Yes, yes, the socks. Don't look at me with those wide eyes. I grew up in the middle of great shortages, but I don't know why the shortage of socks is deeply embedded in my memory, even more than that of milk or meat. It's a lack that is deeply ingrained in my subconscious and comes back to haunt me every time I see socks in stores. Of course you are dying to understand how a child or many children could be missing socks, well hell I and many other children were missing them. We were children growing up in a dictatorship, amidst shortages and poverty, and those shortages have certainly left consequences for us. I, thank God, manifest it by buying socks, maybe because I want to assure myself that now that I'm older, I won't miss them anymore. Do you see that this is really a complex acquired from childhood? We believe that I do not need a psychoanalyst to cure him. I don't believe that a few unused socks left in the drawers are a reason to spend more money on a psychoanalyst to get rid of the habit of buying them

She would probably continue with this unusual story about her husband, if she didn't notice the kind smile on his face.

- Really, a few more socks are nothing to talk about - said Mario, who, perhaps moved by what he heard, continued almost in tears:

– I'm sorry that I made you experience that time once again and even worse for the fact that you really experienced it.

- You don't know what that experience is, even if you want it, you won't be able to achieve it - she wanted to answer her husband who had found an elegant way to show his compassion and empathy, for an experience that he couldn't even achieve perceive it.

For a moment, he wanted to tell them about a cold winter Sunday when the stove filled with wet wood, barely catching fire and producing dark smoke rather than heat, failed to heat the apartment's small living room. small. He didn't even heat that cold apartment, where the sun never shines even in the summer, nor did he dry the clothes washed that day, with which the four children of the family would have to dress for school the next day. Among them and socks. Alma felt the cold seeping through her bare feet even more and couldn't understand why all six members of her family didn't have more than one pair of socks. Or, why did the mother have that damn habit of washing the children's little clothes every Sunday, when she couldn't even afford more than a pair of socks, then why did she wash them every week especially in winter when they were barely there? In the midst of these thoughts, he was in vain when he heard his father's voice gently ordering him to go buy bread at the neighborhood store.

- What should I go with? - wanted to ask him - you know I don't have socks, bro. How do you put your feet in shoes? – the question he had in May of the language, however, he did not pronounce. Maybe because the father who worked all day in a brick factory got sick and at the end of the month he was not able to buy enough socks for his children. He didn't make a sound, took two handkerchiefs with which he wrapped his reddened feet from the cold and with the utmost care put them into his shoes. How old was he? Maybe 10 or 11 years old, but old enough to understand that poverty is something bad.

Now, after many years when the times had changed and the system with them, he had to run to the mall once again to buy another dozen socks for 11-year-old girls. Maybe this would convince 11-year-old Alma that the lack of socks would not accompany her all her life, but one day would come and only a faint memory would remain. He found himself fixated on that distant, cold December day that had reddened and blistered his bare feet so badly. It's not that she didn't know that exactly on that cold Sunday in December, her unconscious fear that she didn't have socks that could warm her cold and cracked feet from frostbite started.

What if he actually went to the mall and bought a dozen woolen socks? Would 11-year-old Alma's feet be warm?

When he went to the mall again two days later, he didn't buy a single pair of socks.

He bought only two handkerchiefs which he knew he would never use. He didn't really know what they could be used for. Except to cover the memories.