Disappearing
Trip Start
Jan 01, 2007
1
2
Trip End
Ongoing
Uta, Italy
Thursday, June 1, 1995
"I have lost it. I thought Iīd be able to find it again, but it is gone. Forever."
"What have you lost?"
"I have lost my beauty"
I
[1995]
"We will always be friends", he said in a matter-of-fact way that made me worried and relieved at the same time. I felt worried because that always felt like a life sentence, something I was happy about there and then but not in a future I still did not think about but I knew it was incumbent. I felt relieved because it was good having a friend. He was a good friend, a kind one. One of those people who have nice eyes and they use them to smile.
The summer was hot like Italian summers can be. The light was soft and incandescent, like everything around us could have caught fire and disappeared at any moment, just like a picture when you put it near the fire.Maybe it is simply the material memories are made of, but looking back then I see the two of us, M. and I, like transitory characters through a moving picture.
I think I was happy that summer, when life had a day-by-day quality that you loose as you grow up.
The car that would have taken my first ever friendīs life away was still eleven years into the future. Although, didnīt we have the insane premonition that things could not just stay the way they were forever? Didnīt we feel that we needed something sooner or later to save us from that place?
To me that something would come after two years in the form of a scholarship to go to a private school on the other side of the country.
As it turned up we would not always be friends.
But back then we really believed somethings are forever, premonition or not.
We were united by a dislike for being idle, and moved on our bikes around a town where nobody knew us, like ghosts no-one can see. Maybe that is why we were friends. Because we were both ghosts that did not belong there.
Being different is what pulled us together, despite the fact we were indeed very different from each other.
M. was a tall slim boy, with green eyes and a porcelain complexion. I was much more Mediterranean, with coarse hair and dark eyes.
He was kind and discrete, I was - and still am- determined and vocal.
I was younger than him, but that was never an issue, cause I have always been older than my age. This might be because I grew up with a brother who was fighting cancer, or simply I was more mature than my peer group. I never regretted having older friends, they are like windows to what is coming your way.
We spent that summer playing tennis, biking around, spending time with the rest of the gang. The gang...not exactly your typical group of childhood friends, but we had good moments. I think the point in time I am talking about was one of those. It was before I left that town forever, when we still all really liked each other. It was before M. got stuck in the moving picture, waiting for a miracle to save him. That miracle came in the form of an accident, when eleven years later he was hit by a car whilst cycling his way back home, just like a ghost no-one, not even the speeding car driver, can see.
II
[1997]
All or nothing.
That was what my reflection in the mirror was thinking that day. All or nothing.
Those eyes, fixed and intense, knew there was something very important at stake. They did not know entirely what that something was, but its importance was so supreme that the thought of failure made my stomach go numb. The thought of missing this chance, this morphosis, was just too immense to bear.
All or nothing.
Make it through these selections.
Allow yourself to believe they mean everything to you, despite the fact this might mean dealing with pure and perfect failure should things go wrong.
My dad and I had traveled one and a half day to be there, for me to try to win a scholarship for that school. I could have never afforded it otherwise.
It meant great education, but also the promise of a completely different future. A future which would have not taken place in the case of failure.
A future which was in front of me like a parallel life I should have not normally been offered but that nonetheless was there, for me to dream about, for me to fight for.
Everything that I am now, all the things I have done since, are all so related to that day that I doubt any of them might have taken place I had not won that scholarship.
In a way it is pretty unfair that destinies are put in the hands of such inexpert hands. If it is true that youth is wasted in the young, so is self determination
My father was in the B&B room, sleeping after a long drive.
I was in the bathroom, looking at my reflection in the mirror.
Looking at me.
Looking through me.
At my eyes, filled with hope and fear.
Filled yet again with the supernatural premonition that a change that could have redefined my whole life was about to take or not to take place.
Change. It took only that moment in time to define such a consequential change.
All my hopes for a different life were played during those days of selections, separating before from all the different afters.
Pushing me away from Uta, from those hot afternoons, from all I had known before.
Pushing. Pulling.
All or nothing.
III
[2007]
The momories of those years appear in my head like baloons in the dark. Memory is a weird thing: we live every single moment of our lives but if we were asked to say all the things we remember, it would probably take us only a few hours to exhaust our recollections.
It is like a continuous fading away.
I donīt know why, but I have rarely thought about that part of my life. I guess I have always considered it as a prologue to my īreal lifeī, the one that started when I went to boarding school and then moved to London. However, these days I have a lot of time to think and especially after M.īs death I have gone back to those times often.
At the beginning it was like trying to see in the dark: you just make up the shape of things, if that. Then, slowly but surely, things start to pop up. That is why I used the expression īlike baloons in the darkī. It seemed appropriate. A quite disturbing image.
So, for instance, I suddenly remember M.īs favoruite song, or the butterflies I felt when on my way to those selections.
I remember the eighties dresses of my mother when I was young, the time I learned to swim.
My father simply threw me off his boat, I think they call it a deep end approach.
It makes me sad that I have forgotten these things for a long time.
One thing I do remember is the expression on my motherīs face the day I won that scholarship.
The telegram arrived in a hot sunny day of late spring.
