There is something I can’t stand at all: personal space invaders. I need more personal space than other people because I become hysterical when somebody gets very close to me.
It would be perfect for me if I could always go surrounded by an invisible and impassable portable space, as if I were an only bullfighter placed in the middle of a deserted bull ring. A huge bull ring like the world’s largest bull ring, La Monumental in Mexico City.
Good manners make me conceal the strong aversion I feel when I have to go into a crowded elevator, full with humans. It grosses me out! I don’t feel the same with animals, whose smell doesn’t bother me. I would rather find a peed-and-pooped Bengal tiger in the elevator in my building than my next-door neighbours.
If my only choice is to share the elevator with some human biological specimens, I squeeze myself as hard as I can against the mirror, bending my head down almost touching my chin to my chest (my Pilates exercises for shoulder pain and neck aches have proved of great use).
I hold my breath all the ride long, like Houdini in The Chinese Water Torture Cell, remembering the tips of a static apnea course I once took at the University swimming-pool. In this way my lungs don’t get any polluted air, and I can go into or leave my flat completely miasma free. This is not a trivial matter because those fetid emanations from my neighbours surely cause at least one of the top ten incurable diseases.
I wish that I lived surrounded by Japanese only. How wonderful! Everybody wearing surgical masks. Mouths and noses politely covered.
I am sure that God and His angels, bearers of His throne, always wear spotless balaclavas exposing only their heavenly eyes. On the contrary, Satan and his hideous court of demons must show off rotten fauces exhaling mephitical puffs of breath on damned to Hell for eternity. I know better than to misbehave in this earthly world.
I burst, reaching paroxysm, if someone touches me. I especially hate people waving their hands and gesticulating vigorously while speaking and then touching me constantly with their paws (Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!- I always want to yell. I can’t help being so cinephile).
I would cut off these personal space intruders’ arms. It is not enough to cut off their hands. However sickening the touch of a strange hand on my innocent flesh may seem, it would be far worse the contact of a revolting stump.
As an alternative to my perfect portable space, invisible and as gigantic as the most gigantic bull ring ever built, I could put up with a world inhabited by headless and armless creatures, shaped like the Winged Victory of Samothrace. I could tolerate stoically an elevator full of creatures with that same looks, wings always folded into their backs not to be a nuisance (does Marie Kondo have a YouTube video explaining how to fold wings?).
