About fifteen or sixteen.. Seventeen? I don’t remember exactly,  I was attending high school and I noticed some strange case in some of my friends’ behaviour: three of them in a short period of time changed their attitude, their way of smiling, their way of talking. It was as they put a distance between them and me,  them and the others. It was a sort of building up a mask, a way of appearing.
Before such a change, things happened and everybody was what he was: his reactions, his direct will. It was a sort of nakedness softed by the pressure of friendly empathy. Now, instead, they were building a new person, with a certain coherence and continuity, a recognisability of the subject.
The strange thing was that all the three felt the need to inform me about that: “look, I am this kind of person, one who smiles this way, one who is serious, one who reacts astutely, or smartly.”
The three were close friends of mine, that’s the reason why they needed to inform me of a change I would anyway noticed.
And I could notice similar changes in other acquaintances later on, without giving any information from their part, as our relationship had not been so close.
Such transformations left me a little bit more alone, excluded. Even if they did not appear to me really strange: notwithstanding that I had not been invested by such a change Even if it seemed to me inside a range of possibilities, I also looked at it as a rather funny thing.