When someone takes my hand, I am suddenly aware of my body temperature. If I am warm, I know my palms are going to be covered by a thin layer of sweat that is going to transfer onto your fingers. I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable; here: when we hold hands like this I can feel the bones underneath your knuckles, and that soft part of skin in between the thumb and the forefinger pressing against that same spot on my body.

Egyptians did not preserve the brain or the heart in canopic jars. Those were designated for the stomach, intestines, lungs and liver (which were all needed in the afterlife). The heart was left inside the rotting body, so that it could be weighed by the god Anubis, in the afterlife. The brain was liquified and poured out of cadavers, before mummification. And so, one's feelings, knowledge, conversations, memories, recipes, imagination — where did they go? I am not promising you’ll find them anywhere, I am just assuring you that I will be unabashedly vulnerable.

I am thinking about that Sam Smith song: you say I'm crazy. I have it in my head as I write. Only one, one and one only. I am thinking about how many things in my life are monogamous (only this brand of coffee, only one pair of slippers). I think about going out with my mum and stopping by the sweet section at the grocery store: “Okay – she says – you can pick one. But only one”. What if I don’t want to choose? I guess I have to, see, the same way I choose you.

Chronestesia is the name given to the brain’s ability to maintain simultaneous awareness of past, present and future and to “travel” back and forth between them; we all function like this, whether we want it or not we can’t stop thinking about it. We are there and here, and there which is far away, and there which is nearer. Now you need to tell me where you are.

When I met you, you were a flower, and I did not dare to touch you.

You are only one block away from me when I call you in tears.

I call you from nonna’s house: you look very handsome.

I had just taken the first real breath of my life, and everything seemed fragile and blurry, almost like I had just woken up from a very long dream (and maybe I had) where my body was made of poisonous matter, where everything I touched turned into a mistake (King Midas and the nightmare touch). I was holding my nonna’s hand walking towards the butcher shop, I was jumping up and down, like some kind of animal that just realized how to use their legs, I was flying over the pavement. Onelio, the butcher, he had very few teeth left in his big mouth and a strong roman accent hissing between each word (a determined cadence as he listed all the fresh meat), his shop was clean and lined with some black and white ceramic tiles, a little bit too big for just the refrigerating counter on one side. As every butcher’s shop, you would access it through a curtain made out of fine plastic beads that let out a nice clicking noise as you moved it to pass through. Nonna would always order a whole chicken “to make the good stock”, veal loin or chuck back-rib if she wanted to make fried polpette (meatballs) for nonno, minced beef for a meatloaf for us children, brisket sometimes for special occasions.

There’s a scene in the movie Le Fate Ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies but I believe that in English it is also called His Secret Life) where one of the characters makes polpette first thing in the morning and asks the protagonist: “You need to tell me where I have made a mistake […] look: there is grated a pple, red chili, and I have cooked them with onion and orange peel. Maybe there shouldn’t be any onion… […] Too sweet, aren’t they?”. Following a recipe is what is more similar to a ritual than anything else that we do in our day to day life, and it is very similar to writing or to put a story together. It’s a very delicate act of combination. And not following a recipe (not having all the ingredients or not knowing them, not using the right procedure or the right order) can lead to brilliant discoveries, to okay results, but most of the time to frustration.

Me and my nonna are in her small kitchen and I am sucking on a small white plastic straw stuck in what should be a peach flavoured iced-tea in a 20ml carton, but that in reality is just tepid sugary water. She has already grinded the roasted veil and some mortadella, soaked the old bread in milk and grated parmesan, she’s now mixing everything together with one egg and a pinch of salt. She spreads some breadcrumbs on the wooden table and starts shaping the polpette with the palms of her hands, coating them evenly and piling them on a large plate: between her fingers, the stickiest bits of the mixture accumulate. As she places the meatballs on the side she smiles, because she knows that nonno will be so pleased to eat them for dinner, and this makes me happy too. I wonder if I will ever be able to make polpette for you once, when our hair is as white as our skin, thin like a sheet of rice paper.

But you will never get old.

And so we grow old together.

I have got troubles with you: I think you’re something and then you’re something else.

Picture this: we have just moved in together; you are carrying a stack of three full cardboard boxes in your arms. I am not sure how they are not falling. It’s early morning and we’ve been up since 5AM: we drink black coffee from a big thermos that we used to put out of its corner in the kitchen only while camping. I’m so hungry. You stand up and break three eggs in a large glass bowl, you add salt and pepper, and some grated cheese: you make me the most delicious omelette. I eat in bed with a hat and socks on because the heating is not working.

Mornings are particularly difficult without you.

When I was younger I used to get mad at you every time you would prepare breakfast for me. I would tell you that I didn’t have time to eat, I didn’t have time to sit down and chat with you. My day would start with an argument, I even miss that. I would always call you from work about something I had forgotten (a USB pen, a book, medications) and you would send me pictures of our room pointing your finger asking: “Do I look there?”

Sometimes I would call you only to hear your voice.

I wake up: I know I’m awake because you are so far. You are beyond the stratosphere, past the liveable surface of the Earth. Still, I’m resting my head on that very pillow I have embroidered for you, with a simple drawing of a flower and a bee, before bees were in danger. I remember thinking that my embroidery of a bee could be the last picture of the insect one day, that future generations will look at your pillow and wonder: what is a bee? What is a flower? Maybe they’ll ask themselves “what is a cushion?”, as well: the creatures of the future don’t know what sleeping is. The creatures of the future might be the only ones that will reach you, someday, where you are lying down all alone at the border between the universe and our conscious world.

Where all the bees will go to die.

But let me think again about the stratosphere and the life you had up there.

It is funny how we always want to be up, and up and more, we want to be beyond. I liked you straight away because you were the first person to tell me that you were happy to be where you were. It took you a long time to be able to be here with me, effort and focus, some pain and sporadic love (in small things, in useful things).

There is this song that talks about having our own sense of time: I am not sure where ours is. And back again, where are we? Are we beyond? For now you are just sitting next to me; we sit in silence, we are thinking about so many different things we must say to each other, at some point but –

I am here on Earth and you are there in a blurry image I keep seeing in my head. Maybe that’s what it means, to be beyond: not knowing where the fuck we are going. Uncertainty builds up on the memories we have made available, I show you the mole I have just under the elastic band of my underpants and you move your hair to reveal a small scar on your temple: I touch it and it feels like it is my fault.

When we can understand each other, we communicate dancing in unison: I searched for clues on your face, on the tips of your fingers. But we don’t always have to know. I was perfectly fine not knowing you, I didn’t know anything about your parents and their small flat in Bristol, and your sister that looks so much like you. Now you are making me a cup of coffee with that instant powder from Aldi that testes like hazelnut, and I tell you “I can never go back to regular coffee now”.

I am looking out of the window and I can see: rooftop, rooftop, pergola veranda, red bricks and black bricks and grey bricks, and white windowsills, so bright it almost hurts to look at them. My feet are cold: I empty one bottle of nasal solution on the floor and I start dancing in the puddle as if I’m touching sea water, as if I am surrounded by it and not by yellow carpet and grey walls and rooftop and rooftop and another pergola veranda. Going outwards there’s a choice to make:

on one hand there’s this concept of home I have been refining over the years; on the other the unknown.

Home is: a cold rice salad with cubed cheese and pickled capsicum, a football game, a 24 pieces porcelain set with plants drawings on them, a forgotten bus ticket that no one is going to ask for as you cross the bridge and the park and the valley where the local nomad community lives and roasts duck meat and foraged greens.

On the other side there is a girl dressed in a tight orange dress that wraps her breasts and thighs, she shivers and she knows she’s the most beautiful woman in the world when the sun sets; there’s an early Tuesday morning and freshly ground coffee, the idea of maybe making pancakes with sugar and lemon, with agave or maple syrup, with strawberry jam, with chocolate cream.

Outside all this, there is a daunting trusting exercise. Do I trust in my future being right here, right now, or is my future in another atmosphere, above the surface of the Earth (as we know it), sandwiched in between the sky and the emptiness of outers space (with you?), in between the Mediterranean sea and La Manche. But I know there’s somewhere else: I see a bird nesting on the boxwood bush, laboriously transporting twigs and foliage, creating the perfect pallet to rest and tweet; and then it leaves. There is a bird here also: it balances itself on the laundry cord outside of my window and it sings to “Baby” by Justin Bieber while I watch my clothes drying. One of the t-shirts says SORRIDERE on its back, but the bird doesn’t know. I’m looking for ripe strawberries under the glass ceiling where the farmers’ market resides. There’s a tile on the floor with drawings of fish and molluscs, their colours are flecked and uneven, and I step on them. I drop one strawberry by mistake on the side of the river where I am eating; a heron catches it and eats it moving its beak towards the sun. I don’t know if this heron has built its nest here, or if it migrates like me towards different rivers and strawberries, different pavements to walk on, different beds to rest in. Every season, every year, growing and falling like leaves.

I am in Mr. Donadon’s shop, he’s the local baker. He bakes the best focaccia with olives and milk rolls in the district (all of my classmates at school are jealous of me when I take out of my rucksack the oily wrap with the bakery’s logo on it), so it’s not unusual to wait sometimes before being served in the shop. It often looks like a crowded bar, where big loaves of wholewheat seeded sourdough are passed over the counter instead of colourful cocktails: there are still occasional fights amongst the old ladies of the neighbourhood for the last low-calories rosetta bread roll, which doesn’t really compare to a drunken fight over a slot machine on the second floor of a Wetherspoon pub, but it is as close as you’ll get here on a Wednesday morning. The bakery shut when I was still in primary school, but right now I am chewing on a warm slice of pizza, sitting at my school’s desk. I have always thought about this delicious bread, and how happy it would make me feel, how good it must have felt for Mr. Donadon to take his creations out of the oven, piping hot, to look at them on the cooling rack.

I started baking bread myself years later. Some months ago, a radio presenter shared on her Instagram page her quick recipe for a good rosemary focaccia. I had immediately taken a screenshot of it on my smartphone, and I have been making that focaccia ever since. What I love the most about this particular kind of bread is that it doesn’t have to prove for a ridiculous amount of time, which means that you can bake it and consume it within an hour time. It is also vegan and fairly healthy (the olive oil being the only real fat element).

In a large bowl, I start by weighting the white flour, then I proceed by adding the instant yeast, the olive oil, a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, a pinch of water (half a glass). When everything starts mixing together, I always have a fear that the dough will be too dry or too wet, that all the powder will sit at the bottom of the bowl or that it will attach to all my fingers (it wouldn’t look as good as nonna’s fingers covered in minced meat, it would just be uncomfortable). But my hands are energetic, I have a mission, I want this focaccia to happen. Kneading dough might be relaxing for some people, but to me it is an incredibly stressful operation; it requires physical strength and dedication, and sometimes I am not always ready for it.

The mental rigor needed to produce bread is what pushed me to make this focaccia for the first time. Before finding this recipe, my relationship with bread had grown to be complicated (simply put, unhealthy) and unfulfilling: I would eat an excessive amount of it, confectioned and pre-cut, wrapped in plastic film and smelling of preservatives. If I concentrate enough, I am still in Mr. Donadon’s bakery and my mum is buying me a treat. But that was another time.

When I started being depressed, one of the first things I did was to stop cooking. I couldn’t cook.

To face an empty skillet on the hob was one of my biggest fears, to use the chopping board, the food processor, the oven. So, I would just eat toasts. I would push them in the toaster, then cover them in margarine and yeast extract spread. For breakfast. For lunch. For dinner. At the same time, the thought of my empty fridge terrorized me, so I would occasionally buy vegetables that would rot at the back of the refrigerator, or that my housemates would rescue at the very last minute, tired of looking at them becoming black and mouldy. I would go through an entire loaf of bread in less than a week (on my own), and when I could see the last couple of bread slices, I would get anxious, because not having enough bread meant that I would have had to cook, but I couldn’t cook, so I would have starved to death. But I didn’t want to starve to death: I was depressed, but I didn’t want to die. And then, I have found this short focaccia recipe. I said to myself, “this is basically like the toasts you have been eating for months, so why would it be scary to prepare?”. So, I took my food scale, my large azure bowl, my ingredients; I preheated the oven, covered a baking tray with parchment paper, got my hands dirty with olive oil and spread the dough thin on the paper, pushing with my thumbs as if it was an open book and I was following a sentence. I sprinkled some sea salt (residue of the times I used to cook pasta) and I baked it. I didn’t have any rosemary or brewer’s yeast at the time, but I needed to make this focaccia; so, I didn’t use rosemary, and I substituted the yeast with baking soda.

And there it was, with a golden crust, piping hot, looking at me from its irregular shapes. I cut it in stripes, then in squares: I put those on a large plate and I looked at them for a while, waiting for them to cool down, and then I finally took a bite. The bread was dry, could have used more salt and was still too hot; but it was mine. I didn’t cure my depression with focaccia bread, but it makes me feel better to have found an ally in something I considered part of the problem. And it’s also funny to say that rosemary focaccia healed me.

You already knew me back then.

You had known me for a while at that point, actually.

I pick you up from school a couple of minutes past midday; I’m leaning on the side of the car chain-smoking and looking around the empty parking lot until you appear tapping on my shoulder lightly. You are wearing a yellow beanie and blue long jeans, I’m wearing a short dress and tights; it feels like we come from opposite sides of the Earth. The sky is grey but light: you pick the cigarette from my lips and take a long drag, hollowing your cheeks slightly. “Let’s go to the beach”. And we leave.

On our way there you turn the radio up and stick your head out of the window like a dog; your long hair flies around your face, it goes in your mouth. And the song goes: “Falling in love like this; there’s nothing more perfect than a ‘yes’, with a light heart”. I can feel the sun coming through the glass on my arms and neck; the skin of my hands flexes and relaxes: it makes me feel good to know that I’m physically here with you. You clean your glasses on your shirt and you say: “Falling in love like this; so suddenly and so urgently”.

When we arrive in Ostia, the first thing you do is buying a Cornetto Algida from a bar. It’s still quite cold, so we are alone on the pier above the water, our eyes divided between the turbid sea and the never-ending town that will go ahead until it merges into Roma. Houses and houses and a couple of trees, the bus number 062 all immersed in the shy sunlight. Right now we are not thinking about anything except for that Cornetto and the chirp of the seagulls: we are really happy. There’s a moment when we hold each other close and we promise that things are never going to change, that whatever happens there is always going to be the dirty beach of Ostia, a glass of cheap Falanghina and us holding tight onto our shoulders.

On the drive back you fall asleep and start snoring slightly. The sun is still invisible under its blanket of grey clouds; when the river Tevere is on our left on Via del Mare I quickly close and open my eyes, until a ray appears over Magliana Station and the rest of the driving cars. You wake up.

At this point in time, I am making a custard crostata, following your recipe for the shortbread base. I mix the milk and eggs and sugar on the hob steadily: it’s the first time I make custard, so I am not sure of what I am doing, I don’t trust myself. The first time I baked your crostata I was in my small flat near Bournemouth Square, and I was nervous. I had the same ingredients I had seen you using, yet it didn’t feel right: it might have just been the packaging with English writing, who knows, the yellow butter, that small glass jar where I used to keep the salt…

I remember clearly that when I moved to Dorset I refused to cook Italian food for a while. I wanted to be as distant from you as possible I guess; I missed you too much, but I was becoming another person: I didn’t eat pasta everyday anymore, I was new, contemporary, ever-changing; and so was my cooking. Then, one day (it was one of those days you drag your body through), I arrived back in my flat and I had a big, long cry: as soon as my cheeks were dry I put a pot of water to boil, and I mixed some tomato passata with Pecorino cheese in a pan. I cook some bucatini you had put in my suitcase before I left, and I mix everything together: I eat straight from the pan, being careful not to scratch it with my fork, I add extra cheese.

It is delicious, and I am still new. I am new, and it is still delicious.

Let’s go back to the crostata, now it’s baking in the oven. The secret, you tell me, is to leave it a bit raw in the middle, half-cooked. If I bake it all the way through it will be too dry, too heavy. It would be set and static. It is the gooeyness of it that makes it delicious, it’s that moment when it crumbles between your teeth. That’s when I realize that I want to be like your crostata, I want to be raw. I don’t need to be set, I don’t need to be done.

I don’t remember you here at this point, I wonder where you’re growing.

The crostata is still good though, the shortbread sticks to my palate a bit.

It is nostalgic and melancholic, it tastes exactly like my 18th birthday cake you had made for me. I ate that on the floor adjusting my skirt up to cross my legs. You were there and I was content. How do people say: “we felt better when we felt worse”.

Today I stepped on a scale and I have the same weight of when I was fourteen: does it mean I never changed? When you came to see me, in that same Bournemouth flat, you were broken into tiny pieces: it was almost poetic. To look at you, it was like looking inside one of those nuts’ variety packs: you were all sort of things, from a sweet almond to a small peanut. When you were as young as my weight, your hair was short and you would sing for me: ♪”When you are feeling small and useless, when life doesn’t fit you and you don’t fit life, just remember you are a child of the stars and the moon and you have the right to be here, as for every single living creature. You will be fine”♪. I can’t believe we thought we were so miserable, we barely knew ourselves, we would still hide cigarettes from our parents.

On that day, you came to me at dawn in your pyjamas to ask me if I wanted to go to the beach with you. With my trousers covered in sand, I realize now that I had always known that there was going to be a time when this would be the past, but when the time came, I wasn’t ready. It’s so much time. And when we were saying we were wasting it… maybe, was it true? It’s been so long. Anyway, back to the beach, back to the nut pack, back to the crostata, back to Bournemouth. I am digressing, I don’t know where I am going.

Right, that small flat actually had a decent size living room that accumulated prior tenants’ possessions over the years and gradually became this spacious storage space: we ate dinner then once, pushing all the rubbish to one side, when my mamma was visiting. She had brough nonna’ s frappe on her plane and we ate them directly from the Tupperware box lined with kitchen paper where she had put them after frying them. I am licking my fingers to eat the last bit of the icing sugar; you are washing the dishes in the kitchen before going home. My mamma insists on helping you, but you are assertive and keep saying no. I am still sipping on my last glass of rice wine when you dry your hands on a tea towel. I can sense that you’re mad at me, but you won’t tell me why, so I start telling you a story, to see if you remember.

You are here with me when I am picking on my middle school classmate who has forgotten his shoes for P.E. I think it’s funny to make fun of him for not having trainers because all of my friends around me are laughing, so he takes my joke and he sits down on one of the gymnastics mats at the far-right corner of our school’s gym. He cries. It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know why I made fun of him in the first place, and I mean, why is it funny that he has forgotten his shoes? I go to sit down next to him and I apologize, and he just says “It doesn’t matter”. He is the seventh of eight brothers, I see them all at church every Sunday, it’s a family the looks kind of comical. His dad is so tall, his shoulders wide and his neck veiny and bulky, while his mum is the tiniest woman, with small glasses on the tip of her nose and always the same green satin eyeshadow. The children are a peculiar mix of heights, and they all have the same gentle facial features, with plump lips and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. My course mate looks like a very skinny cherub when he’s sitting in the corner of our school’s gym.

I am in the far-left corner of my middle school gym, and I am watching the volleyball game sitting down on a gymnastics mat. Underneath the sadness, I have a very warm memory of those times, they smell like that weird Abercrombie & Fitch replica ambient perfume that they used in all Stradivarius shops, and of 1 Million by Paco Rabanne (every “cool guy” wore 1 Millionby Paco Rabanne). They are smells that stick to your nostrils for hours, they glue themselves to your clothes. Do you remember? We would go to our local mall with the bus number 38 towards Via Baseggio, we cross the busy street running and we spend entire afternoons there doing practically nothing. There was a big Fnac on the second floor, and you used to save your pocket money to buy CDs on special offers. You buy me “Let It Bleed” by The Rolling Stones for my 15th birthday and I don’t listen to it for years, until one early morning I am walking to East Dulwich station and I start hearing "Country Honk" in my ears from my shuffle playback, and I think of you after such a long time. I remember all of your petals and the way you would grow on the walls of my middle school building.

I invited my course mate out.

I am listening to Mick Jagger on Grove Vale and I jump to the recorded horn sound noise before the violin starts playing.

We don’t have any money to go to a café or to buy a slice of pizza after school, so we sit outside on a bench that smells of piss at the intersection between Via Val Padana and Via Val di Chienti, our heavy rucksacks thrown at our feet, on the concrete floor. It’s 2008, and he tells me his dad was sacked the day before, that’s why he cried. I asked him what they are going to do and he tells me that him and his family are going to move out of their house into a smaller, cheaper one. I have been to his flat, I have seen his room (shared with two of his siblings), I have sat on his single bed, on his duvet cover with a discoloured print of AS Roma football team and I think about the first room me and my brother used to share: it was narrow and short, my brother was tiny and used to sleep in a crib at the far end of the room, next to the window, while I had a real bed that mamma would put up on the wall every morning after my night’s sleep, so that she could walk across the room to get my brother. But my course mate is not a child, nor are his brothers. They cannot sleep in tiny cribs or in foldable beds. So, his older brothers start working at the local bar and supermarket, while he will go on undertaking agricultural studies to go work in a vineyard just outside of Rome. We never see him again: he is the first one of us to disappear.

There’s a plane leaving from Gatwick Airport at
seven o’clock.

At six o’clock you are holding my hand while we share the same pair of earphones (one in my right ear, one in your left ear) and we only have three songs on our playlist.

You are distracting me – a lot.
I write you a love letter
on the night of our first anniversary
but I can’t remember
where I put it.
So I guess you’ll never know…

You bought a plastic fern plant from Tesco the other day.
You have been watering it
(shiny plastic)
to make it feel real.
Like that story of the two lovers
who bought each other plastic roses
and said that their love would die
when the roses would wither,
so I lit a match
and I melted the plastic
and I burned the petals
and then said that it was
a contemporary art installation
criticising mass production
and your mass-produced feelings.

“Christ, how I wished I wasn’t here”.

When we’re sitting on the plane we get used to the engine’s sounds and that becomes our silence. I start crying almost immediately and you fall asleep.

I don’t understand
why you have
to be so mean.
When you got pregnant
you left your father’s house
and your old mother’s hands
and you decided to follow
a glittery shiny dancer
that would walk you to
pre-natal pilates
and couple’s therapy
and do your make-up
in the backseat of the taxi
with a short Maybelline New York eye pencil
and a steady hand.

Matching toothbrushes and toothbrush holders from Muji: they are so ridiculous and expensive and whoever owns them is kind of a prick.

I have this pair of trousers that are really good for running.

Your arse looks amazing; all the time.

You’re eating your chicken parm
with the tiny fork and knife
the air hostess has provided you with.
My stomach is upside down
inside out.
I think about when I first met you
and I just wanted
you to dance with me
and my stomach was a bit sore
because of all the gin
but it doesn’t matter.
I was sure that our three-songs mix
contained at least
one song we could sing along to.
Instead we are stuck
listening on repeat
to depressed and convoluted renditions
of our own state of being.
The lights get dimmer and
the windows’ curtains are shut
to create an artificial night
and let everyone rest.
I queue for the toilet
behind a child and his mother
and I can suddenly feel
blood inside my knickers.
It doesn’t matter.

We will be leaving Gatwick Airport soon
via coach
passing through
terminal 1 & 2
terminal 4
terminal 5
Ringwood station
where it will snow for approximately 20 minutes.

I have lost interest in your CDs and malls, but I still think about you carefully looking at album covers, counting your coins on the palm of your hand. When they closed that Fnac, you swore you would have never gotten inside that shopping centre again, and so it happened, I didn’t ask any questions.

We’re back in bed and you’re telling me about our English teacher’s son, who is apparently working as a sous-chef at Celler de Can Roca in Girona, the three Michelin-stars rated restaurant owned by one of the judges of MasterChef Spain. You showed me his Instagram page with a large, excited smile, where the pictures of his dishes are poorly archived with badly chosen filters and blurred frames to mimic a sort of vintage look; you zoom in on a picture of a rose made out of mushrooms: the edges are charred, caramelized, they spread on the plate and blossom, greasy with butter. I have always felt guilty about using butter for cooking, but when I am preparing dinner for you I don’t mind. I want the food to taste especially good, I want you to thank me and I want you to want more. This is how I want to keep you, I want to fry some brown mushrooms in melted butter, too: I add chili flakes and thyme. I am no chef, but I know this is what you want, I don’t need to tell you, you don’t need to remind me and neither does our English teacher’s son.

I sit up on the bed and I tell you: “I want to keep you past when it is convenient, past the novelty and the excitement, I want to keep you when your veins are fat with cholesterol and you can’t bathe on your own anymore. I don’t mind, I’ll wash you. I’d do anything for you. This is what I have learned: it is not about putting myself aside, it’s about making your needs, mine. So when you cry, I cry. And when you laugh, I laugh. And when you lose interest in the sensible world I am there and you don’t need to touch me or smell me or see me, I simply am there, and you just know. I want you to completely, fully trust me, deeply, unconditionally, like you would trust your mother or your sister or yourself”.

You don’t even ask what happened, you just come straight to me. You find me sitting down on the pavement at the bus stop. My eyes are already dry and I am wearing a very calm expression, my whole face is so relaxed my mouth falls a bit open. My trousers are ripped on the knee by a cigarette burn that has teared the fabric and exposed my red skin. You notice it and cup my leg with the palm of your hand. When I feel your skin touching mine (it’s warm, it’s wet with sweat because you ran clenching your fists), I look up. This is one of those moments that I would really like to remember perfectly, but the truth is that I don’t know what you said to me, and I can’t really make it up. It was something in between a prayer and a lament, it came from your vocal cords like a raw, dissonant sound, like your throat was lined with salt. And when it reached me I accepted it all, and I told you how wrong I had been: I didn’t feel any shame anymore, there was no point in pretending. You sit down next to me while the bus leaves and then another and then another and then another.

We never leave.

We leave.

There was a period of my life when I was extremely happy. Not all the time, I wasn’t happy in an unrealistic kind of way: it was very, very real, it was tangible. It was there, I could see it. Around that same period, I used to ride a bike: it was a slim, black bike with no gear shift and a metal basket in front of the handlebar where I used to put my groceries (I once cracked all twelve eggs of a twelve-egg pack cycling back home) and that I had irremediably bent on one side after making the bike fall multiple times trying to park it. When we decide to bike all the way to lake Biwa, we are looking at Google Maps on one of our phones and we are pointing at this one road that connects Shirakawa-dori Street directly to Otsu town, cutting through what on the map is a big patch of green. We all agree it is a good idea, the best idea! And the next morning, we meet somewhere around Gingkaku-ji temple, for some reason I am wearing a black, long fitted skirt and I have my hair up in a ponytail so when we start cycling my hair doesn’t fly all over my face. We are very energized as we start pedalling towards the lake, but then the small street we are travelling upon becomes larger and larger, until it is a two lanes motorway and we are pushing our bikes with our hands on the side, facing the cars that are going opposite our way to minimize the chances of being run over.

We carry our bikes like that for most of the way, cycling when the road would be slightly safer and flatter. Two hours into our journey we stop in Yamanakacho, a couple of houses and a torrent between Kyoto and Otsu that looked like it had been forgotten for decades, but to us was like a holy vision. We sit down next to the water stream, we lay down on the asphalt, stretch our legs and our arms wide, we take big sips from our water bottles. There’s a house close to where we lay where the only sign of life is the laundry hanging outside from a plastic cable (two t-shirts, one black and one white, and a towel). It’s a big house, a two-story building with a sharp tiled rooftop and some cut wood logs on the right side. But you distract me: as the torrent rumbles you make your way on one of the moss-covered rocks near the water, being careful to not get your sandals wet. You laugh at me and move your hair back and forth, your oversized white t-shirt moves with it too, you close your eyes and tilt your head. We carry on.

We spot a 7-Eleven on the way and we stop to catch our breath again: I enter the store wanting to buy some ice-cream but I end up purchasing a suspicious blackberry-flavoured jelly which you tell me works like an energy drink, some sort of solid Gatorade substitute, and I chew on it outside. There’s a truck parked in front of the store where someone has left his Shiba Inu on the driver’s seat, the window slightly rolled down to get some air flowing. He starts barking, viciously, violently and makes me jump: that’s our cue to go. Half an hour later, after the steepest stretch of road yet, we stop in an abandoned parking lot weirdly settled in a recess of the main road (maybe the reason why it was abandoned in the first place), and as we look past some electric pylons, if we squint our eyes and really focus we see it… we see it! At a distance, far, far away, nebulous and cloudy like a dream or a fantasy: water. We see the lake, a small band of blue painted against the bright sky, and we see constructions: the buildings of Otsu town surround the lake. We sight, we cheer; we point at the landscape like it is impossible, like we can’t believe it: the road is going down, spiralling on the side of the mountain we just cycled above. It is vertiginous, it is even scarier than the motorway we started with, more upsetting than the barking Shiba Inu. There’s a blossoming cherry tree in the parking lot, we are sure that there are going to be more down there.

We get on our bikes.

We rest some more.

Homework: today my horoscope asked me to commit to loving myself vigorously. It said that I should kiss myself and hug myself every day, all the time. That I should be braver (braver and braver and braver), and was I (am I) a coward? Maybe. Most certainly. I was reminded of that one time I was trying to pinpoint the exact moment the spirit came down on Earth and changed everything with one, absolute, precise, masterly hit. Will it come again? I am sure it found me because I was ready (because I wanted to), I just have to remember how it felt like to wait for a divine (earthly) intervention. Maybe the only commitment I should make to myself today is to remember how to take my mind away from myself for at least five minutes.

I’m sorry that I didn’t have a glamorous adolescence. I am sorry I didn’t connect with a thousand people and didn’t look fashionably detached (I was still called a slut, don’t worry). Most of the connections I formed when I was young have rightfully died, and I don’t regret letting them. I hate to think about those times, but most of all I hate thinking that having the kind of life I did is not enough, it’s not fun or adventurous. It was enough for me. My life and my pain are enough. You might not consider it “normal” (fair), but it still happened. I’ll tell you why I am the way I am, so maybe you’ll stop thinking I am someone who was too afraid to live.

I am in one of the bathroom stalls of our favourite bar and I am looking down at my knickers stained with just a few droplets of blood. Just a few, like tears coming out of an irritated eye. Nothing important, nothing major, just a bit of water down your cheek that you can just wipe with the back of your hand, absently, carelessly, while you're walking somewhere you really need to be. I take the knickers off and I stuff them in the sanitary pads bin in the cubicle. I pull my trousers up and I walk out.

I walk around and the light follows me, one step, on light bulb; the tic of the automatic system follows the toc of my heels. I am wearing a short black skirt that I found one day in my wardrobe. I don’t know whose skirt it is, I suspect it being a relic of a time when we used to exchange clothes continuously, although our bodies had such different shapes. You would fold my long, flared trousers over your ankles, and you would tie my colourful handkerchief behind your back and neck to make a top. It was a very weird kind of skill that you had, you could make clothes out of everything.

When I told you I was going to get married, you started shredding all the white plastic bags you could find in your house (under the kitchen sink, in your drawers). You would tie the strips together to make yarn, and you knitted me a wedding blouse. You wanted to build me a ceremonial armour, with all your chippy shop bags accumulated over the years; you would have been my armour yourself, if only I could have worn you, wrapped over my shoulders and all my vital organs, over my stomach and my legs. You would have become fabric for me.

Sometimes I would like to ask you about how she tried to kill herself. Just for a selfish, purely narcissistic reason. I want to know who she was and why you loved her so much. Did she make you become the person you are today? What if you had never parted ways, how would you be? I want to know why you loved her. I want to know all the details.

I want to know why she didn’t die.

She’s all smiles and small, luminous eyes. When she sits across me at the bar’s table, she takes her jacket off and she looks at me like she has won (the war, the lottery, you). Her hair is shorter than what I remember, it brushes her shoulder (just about). She’s wearing a light beige buttoned-up cardigan and tight jeans, I spot a silver orthodox crucifix necklace poking out of her white shirt. Her sister, who is my age, has just had a baby. She called her Diletta, beloved; I saw the pictures on Facebook. “That’s why I stopped smoking”, she’s telling me, sucking on a Juul black pen. She’s an angel.

I ask her if she wants a coffee, she shakes her head and asks the waiter for a single glass of tap water. I hate that my heart is beating this fast. None of us wants to start this conversation, but I ask her how she’s doing. She’s better, so much better since you’ve been back. She mentions that you have a lot of sex in the shower for some reason; I just nod, like I am really interested, like I’m happy for her. I think about that one time we were so high we fucked in a public park, I remember the bright red condom envelope on the floor and the smell of dirt: deep inside, I know you really tried to love me, but factually all you were capable of was torturing me.

She is no exception, and I know it’s not her fault.

If I wasn’t feeling so sorry for myself I would be sad, almost worried about her.

I bless
all the lovers
you’ve had before
when I kiss
your thighs
and I wash
your hair.
I am thankful
for all the love
you have received
and all the pain
you have endured.

I think about
the repeated gestures
we do
through a lifetime
and how
we could be surprised
one day
while brushing our own teeth.

I want to know you
like I know my fingernails
like I know
when I am sick
by touching my stomach.
I want to drink you
like I drink
a cold cup of coffee
because I need
the caffeine
and I don’t care if
it’s cold,
it will be better
next time.

And I need you
to know me
with no restraints
deeply and
aggressively,
meticulously
like one of your
infinite grocery lists.

I keep having this dream about our past life. We are going on vacation where I use to go as a child, it is a small hotel on the Adriatic coast, and the bedside tables, and drawers, and cupboards all have the same plastic pattern printed on them, a shiny wave of condensed polyester resin. It smells like fried fish at every time of the day, because the kitchen is constantly frying calamari and shrimps (except for the morning, when it smells like salted water and cappuccino). In my dream, we have just woken up (or maybe we were just going to bed) and I am sitting on a white plastic chair outside, and my thighs are sweating. And you are just there, and it feels familiar, it feels good, it feels like you have always been there looking at the sun rising (or setting) over the sea. You look like my nonno when he would brush and dry my hair before having dinner. You look like that very tanned kid I used to play cards with. You look like my cousin who taught me how to make sand-meatballs.

But it’s not you. Because you were never there. You don’t even know what it felt like. In my dream, your reserve me the sweetest caress and a bottle of chinotto soda, and then I just open my eyes.

“I’m really sorry that you got the wrong impression”, she says. She tells me about the first time you went to visit her family in her hometown, how you bonded with her dad at the pub, how you loved her mum’s cooking. She tells me about all the times you talked about having children together, about baptizing them in her local church.

“You were never loved”, she says. I immediately think about you and me sitting down on the big stairs in front of our school, you lean on me and I can smell your shampoo; you whispered that you loved me in one, single breath (ti amo). That was real, but she doesn’t know.

You whisper in my ear: “I want to know how you feel so that in the future we can feel together. I want to change things, I want to look at you over and over and over again. I hope it’s okay, I hope you don’t mind. Actually, I do hope you mind and accept me looking at you. I don’t want anything to divide us: our skins will slowly melt in each other’s until we are one body, until my epithelial cells are your epithelial cells”.

It’s morning now. You glued my eyelashes together one by one with drops of your saliva that would drip down your tongue and down your chin; and then on my eyes. “This way – you said – you can only see those shapes that form at the back of your retina, like colourful stains. And you can’t see anything awful, anything real”. But I am alone. I hesitate. You apply makeup on my face, a touch of blush powder on my cheeks and black charcoal on my eyebrows. You tint my lips with dark cherries and you braid my hair until I
fall

asleep…

and my eyes are glued together by a dream, also.
I cast a magic spell on your clavicle, another one on your spine, and another one I put directly in the inside of your skull, so you would always hear it as you sleep. Do you remember when we danced in the poplar tree’s snow? We gathered the flowers and then spread them, and they would fall on our bodies like a weightless blanket, a white sheet over our legs as we doze off, and the field also becomes white, the grass liquifies and leaves (like a torrent, a small body of water). And all I am thinking is: thank god I never left your hand.

When it’s time to leave, she turns around and I can see one of her tattoos poking from her trousers; it’s some nettle leaves and blueberries: they are excellent dyeing materials for textile, if you know how to use them.

“I hope you are okay”, she says. My mouth tastes bitter, and I know that my fringe is stuck to my sweaty forehead. I am aware of every single thing that is wrong with me, of all the things that I cannot change, of all the things that I have to let go. To untie my tongue, I picture that pasta dish you cooked for me the first time I came over at your flat, with mushrooms and broccoli because they were the only things left in your freezer. You cooked it with such care, that it felt like the most delicious dinner I had ever had.

I know I’m no angel, and I know that my time with you is over. I am looking at her for what I hope is the last time.

“Oh, don’t worry – I say – I think I will be just fine”.

Your hair is tied up in a bun and your cheeks are smooth, I can see you have shaved through the screen. You have a light shadow underneath your eyes, like you have been worrying. I tell you about my day mindlessly, I shift on the sofa so that my neck is resting on a pillow and my spine is relaxed. You are listening to me, but your eyes are so distracted: you check your phone, out of the window, an unprecise point beyond my face.

“How about you? How are you?”, I ask you. I bring your attention back. For a moment it looks like you are going to cry. You tell me you had a job interview with a school in Beijing, that it was the first time you had made yourself presentable in weeks. We sit in silence for a while: I am thinking about something to cheer you up, you are playing with a small plastic figurine of David Tennant you have found on your childhood desk.

“Can you tell me something good we are going to do when we see each other again?”, this is what I ask you. It’s something I have been asking you at least every week, for months: because we both need to know who we are to each other and who we will be. You think; then, you describe a day we had lived a lifetime ago: we are in our underwear lying down in that small room I used to live in, where the wooden window was so old that all the cold and moisture would come through. We are having sex against that glass wall behind my bed frame and you will kiss my temple and my forehead, the tip of my nose and that dimple on the left side of my mouth.

“That does sound nice. Tell me more.”

Whenever I wanted to talk to you, I could just touch you, slowly, on your scalp and below your left eye, on your cheeks and down to your shoulder: if we can’t share touch together, we must share feelings, because we are headed towards the same future and we need to understand each other in a way that transcends words, sterile plastic gloves, your hidden facial expressions. I am not myself if I am not us, remember? We became one the moment you understood what it meant for me to love and when I realized that there was nothing better in this world than just closing my eyes when you were around and connecting to your heart frequencies, following your heartbeat like a melody. Let me hear it again, let me in.

Sometimes, when I am really sad, I like to imagine to be a block of clay: there is the dirt; and with the dirt footsteps, sunshine, insects and rain. But I don’t remember this. What I know is darkness and moisture, perpetual stickiness, a conglomerate of merged sleeping souls. And dirt. White, grey. Molecules moving, throbbing, swirling in circles: yet I am static. I am claustrophobically concentrated; tightly wrapped; I reflect on my own self, my thoughts are physical matter and they stagnate within me, within my multitude, they bounce off the walls of my physicality like an Olympic ping-pong ball thrown at the speed of sound. I am so concentrated on my own existence that I forgot everything else. And the first time I see the light, I am thorn apart. I am cut with steel wire, thrown on a hard, antiseptic surface.

And for the first time I feel the skin. It’s soft, it’s hot. It dries me. I start to crack, and it smooths me. It applies a strong and firm pression on me, it imprints all of its lines and imperfections. I become a map of its uneven surface, a clone: I acquire the skill of mimicking, I have a purpose and I become it. And then I am destroyed. And then I am created. A repetitive movement, action that doesn’t kill me: my insides twirl, they swirl together in a beautiful dance, they hug and separate, they find harmony in this new choreography. I am compacted and separated; I am aware of every single part of my being. The skin hugs me, it surrounds me, it sweats on me. It massages me slowly, it smooths my edges: I am a shape. I am a definite shape, I begin and I end. I know how to stand and I know when I lose my balance. And I am still possessed by this surface of epithelial cells, tissues and nails.

I start to feel: the skin is a transmitter, it connects me to a world of stimuli; and I feel sorrow. I feel lingering anxiety timidly crawling on the long fingers, I feel an incredible loneliness. I am possessed. I become them and they become me, as I am formed. When I am let go I know I am born. I survive on my own and my conscience is alive. I become new and my memory transforms into an ancient thought. Then I open my eyes and my tea is usually cold, like my hands and feet. You could consider it meditation, it doesn’t make the bad feeling go away, it just makes you look at it in such a way that it becomes a heavy, compacted granule of pain, like a rock or a brick. Something that you can touch, pick up, and eventually throw away.

After your mother died of a cardiac arrest, you spent hours on Google Images looking at anatomical pictures of the human heart. You didn’t really want to understand, everything had been explained to you already, but you couldn’t stop looking. A cardiac arrest is caused by an “electrical malfunction”, bad wiring in the walls of an old house, an overload of power when the dishwasher and washing machine are on and you plug in your hair dryer. Darkness, the lights are off. You are pacing up and down in our small overpriced flat just off Clapham High Street: you clench your fists over your t-shirt on your chest and you count; one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. It looks like you are rehearsing some sort of contemporary dance, walking on the squeaky floor, holding yourself tight.

You are particularly obsessed in finding different pictures of the cardiac muscle: you show me hundreds of them, different seas of red speckled with white and burgundy. Some of them are so beautiful, they look like paintings. There is one you can’t stop looking at, it’s a negative rendition of scar tissue over the myocardium; it’s black, striped with neon green, and blue, and purple. It’s magical, apocalyptic, otherworldly: you know it, you say it to me. You brush your fingers over the picture on your screen over and over, back and forth, like you are cutting open a wound and then stitching it right up with your fingertips; until your skin leaves a mark right there on your desktop, a mottle of dirt over the bright lights of the scarred heart tissue.

One morning, I decide to have that image printed for you. I upload it to one of these online printing services and they send it to me framed for £14.95 after two working days. You put the picture on our bedside table so at night, when the noises of the high street keep you up, you can open your mum’s heart and then stitch it up again with your finger until you feel like you have really, truly, done everything you can, invisible under the duvet cover where the light streets of Clapham cannot find you. After the first picture, you started going to the off-licence downstairs several times a week to get more images printed. You taped them on the wall in front of the sofa like some sort of investigative map: you reprinted the black and neon picture and placed it in the middle, so you could now look at it during the day.

I remember clearly how you started to dance convulsively when you learned that your mother had died. We were drinking some Campari and soda at two in the afternoon sitting outside of that bar settled in one of the arches under the railway tracks of the overground. It was so hot at that time of the day that we were the only ones there, so when you stood up there was no one to pay attention except me. It looked like any form of affection, any nice word that was ever said to you, every gesture of love was leaving your body as you jumped up and down, a syncopated rhythm – tu-tum-tum-tu-tum-tu – until you bumped your head on the low ceiling of the arch and started dancing on the floor instead, with your bleeding forehead between your hands. You were smiling from cheek to cheek as your tears were mixing with the blood coming out of the top of your head; you licked that mixture of liquids from your upper lip and you let out a long and loud cheering noise. I had never seen you that happy: you had never been that happy and you were never that happy again afterwards; I picked you up on my shoulders and brought you home. You were so incredibly small; it was almost as if letting go of all the love you possessed through your mystical dance had made you lighter. Carrying you, it reminded me of carrying a disassembled piece of furniture, one of those IKEA plywood television stands. At home, I put you down on the sofa while I sit on the coffee table in front of you, and you say: “Have you ever cried from being too happy? Have you ever felt so happy that you had to cry?”

In every single drop of your blood there was a microscopic piece of your own heart, infinitesimal cells, conglomerates of microparticles that come directly from your ventricles. You wondered if when your mum’s heart had its electrical failure and stopped beating, her blood started stagnating in her veins and arteries, drying slowly until it was solid, until every part of her had its own little heart made of torrid plasma and blood cells, a heart for every toe on her feet and for every capillary under her livid skin.

You, naked, sitting on my bed. The sun is coming through the window in waves, sometimes strong, sometimes icy and cold. It sits on the freckles on your cheeks. Your body is blooming on my duvet, you have never been this beautiful. I follow the line that goes from your navel to your pubic hair with my finger and I can’t believe that I am allowed to touch you.

You tell me that you need to leave. We get dressed and I open a bottle of sweet Barolo Chinato. I pour some for you in a plastic glass that has an image of some cartoon turtles on the side, and I give you a piece of dark chocolate. As you bite into the chocolate bar you drink the wine in one sip, and you leave while you’re still chewing.

It’s your birthday today.

I am so tired of you sometimes, I just wished you didn’t exist.

We booked a long and spacious table at that Korean restaurant close to the station. We like it there because it’s decorated with wooden shelves and small porcelain vases, almost miniature, painted with white lilies and long, black ears that stretch all around their smooth bellies. The food is also delicious, we always order the same things together with a bottle of chilled rice liqueur. They don’t do desserts, so I have bought you a large slice of Victoria sponge from the bakery behind my flat; it’s decorated with fresh strawberries and cream and a thick layer of sweet, transparent gelatine that makes it look shiny and fake. You say it’s delicious, you lick your upper lip and poke the cream with your finger. No one else shows up, it’s just me and you.

You ask me how am I not bored of spending time with you, and I just laugh. We decide to go dancing: we pay £5 cash to get into the cheapest club on Old Christchurch Road and you buy us four snake-bites; I pour one on my t-shirt and one down my throat as you start dancing with strangers. You touch their hair and shoulders as you move away from me. You keep your gaze gently softened past the crowd, past the music, past the sticky floor and your busy hands, you are levitating.

I go outside to try and get a cigarette from someone, a short guy with a thick Irish accent hands me a Lucky Strike red from his back pocket.

He says:

“I saw you dancing with your girlfriend. You are so hot. It’s too bad you are a lesbian.”

“I know almost everything about you.”

You will be
coming towards me
with a handful of flowers,
dandelions
and
daffodils
and
bluebells.
I am going to look for that uncertainty in your irises
as you hold your
daisies
and
crocuses
and muscaris.

Your hair will be short,
your stomach tense and muscular and hard when I touch it;
you’ll be singing to me
and your voice will be coming
from all the grief and suffering
you have endured.
Chrysanths won’t blossom
until September
but you will have some in your hands
to honor
your dear brother and sister
that you have never met
and our story together
that will already be buried
and rotting.

You will call me primrose
and wash my hair and body.
You will feed me dirt
and compost
and paper that you have collected over the years;
paper you have used to write
about me
and you
and the inevitability of our passing
in the soil
in between your fingers.
You will call me anemone
and you will suck my core away,
and I will hold on to you
as you make a mess of me
as you turn me into a begging child
as you throw me away once I wither.

It will be our wedding day
and you’ll make sure to protect us from the eyes of god, and the priest, and mum and dad.
You’ll make sure it’s only us and our sins
and a large patch of yellow pansies
where we stand
where no one calls us wrong
where no one tells us that we have run away
because it was easier
than being fucking queer.
We will run away
because we want to lie with the purple scillas
and just hold whoever we want to hold
and intertwine
a tulip crown
for every head that needs one;
for every head that needs one.

“Almost, except that one little thing that you don’t tell anyone, the one you always think about on hot summer days”.

He says: “Me and my mate got matching tattoos in Amsterdam when we were fucked off our faces, do you want to see?”

He turns around and pulls his trousers down just enough for me to see his ass crack and next to it the words CUNT NUGGETS written in a round, childish font, sharp against his very pale skin.

When I get back inside, you’re not levitating anymore, instead you are standing in a corner of the club looking at me, your arms crossed over your chest. You sweat through your shirt, and someone must have spilled a drink on your jeans. You ask me to go home.

I end up carrying you. You are too heavy and I can’t pull you over my shoulders, that’s why I drag you from your armpits. I put your left arm over me and I ask you to please, please move your feet. Instead, you look at me with a straight face and you start running to the end of the street, until you sit down crossing your legs around a fire hydrant. You scream at me: “Can we please go eat Italian next year? I’m tired of bibimbap and soju.

You scream at me: “I know almost everything about you, almost, except that one little thing that you don’t tell anyone, the one you always think about on hot summer days”.

You scream at me: “I think I’m going to be sick”.

Yes, I do know that our generation was born anxious, but you don’t have to constantly remind me.

When I took the national career skills assessment, the first job the algorithm offered me was to be an embalmer, with a starting salary of £17,000. I started looking if I could have gotten a mortgage on any house in London with that salary: and no. We are going to view that small sweet-box house for rent in Leigham Vale, with that narrow set of stairs and a one-meter plastic statue of the Virgin Mary sitting on a birch wooden cabinet. The real estate agent asks us about our income, then takes out a calculator and multiplies the rent by 30. “To rent the apartment” she says, “your salaries combined need to be over 36.000 pounds”.

We can’t rent a shit 2 square meters bedroom flat in South London with our embalmer’s salaries.

If I had followed my childhood dream and you yours, we would be, respectively, a surgeon and a farmer. I am not sure if we could have afforded the Virgin Mary apartment, but maybe it is for the best. I wanted to become a surgeon because I used to have the same recurring dream when I was five years old: I would be playing with colourful chalk sticks in my kindergarten school courtyard, until a train would come, derailing out of nothing and seriously injure all of the children. I thought it could have been a good idea to be a surgeon, so after the disaster I would have been capable of putting my friends back together, sewing together their limbs and their open wounds (thinking about this now, I don’t understand how mamma let me go along with this Frankenstein fantasy and didn’t immediately bring me to see someone, a real doctor). But I didn’t become a surgeon, and you didn’t become a farmer. You enrolled in a Philosophy bachelor, and restricted your interest in fruit and vegetables to home-made pickles.

We are in the common kitchen that is part of your dormitory, (SHOCK-DOO is written on the wall in front of us: you wrote that yourself, shokudo means “tavern” and you like the word-play, and to think that someone can really be shocked by a dirty kitchen). You just put on the table a large, sealed jar of fermented Chinese cabbage and ginger and a five litres bottle of rice liqueur, then you pour some pickle juice and some of the alcohol in a tall glass, and you say “I dare you”.

You used to live in your dormitory room because the rent was £15 pounds a month, the majority of which would go into the expenses towards the shokudo and your pickle production. When I am in Tulse Hill with you, it’s very difficult to recognize us: you still tell me I look cute, sometimes, like it is a surprise, like it isn’t supposed to be like that. You recognize me, still, because I wear the same necklace I had when we met, a golden four-leaved clover. You are asking me if I am Irish, and I answer you in Italian.

We end up not getting any house in South London. You postpone your graduation and go visit your mum’s family on Sado Island, and you send me two pictures of the same landscape: one of them with a bright, clear blue sky and the other speckled with the blurry lights of a sunset. You undress and go for a long swim, you leave your phone on the pebbles next to your glasses and a plastic bottle of cold mughicha, because it’s 37 degrees outside and barley tea is the only remedy to keep yourself from slowly boiling alive.

I am swimming in a different water, floating over the surface: mamma is holding me from under my arms so that I don’t go under, my legs are twitching, I can’t stay still. She says: “Just close your eyes and listen”, but my ears are underwater and all I can listen to is the echo of my own eardrums whistling (I found a shell! If you bring it closer, you can hear the waves crashing…) I can’t let go. My body is tense, and my legs are submerged. “You are sinking!”, mamma says. I should learn from one of the bodies on our mortician’s table, but the memory is too far.

When I open my eyes, you are laughing at me, because I have drunk the disgusting pickle juice cocktail. It could have been worse.

I constantly repeat in my head all the cringe-worthy moments of my life, and when something is too embarrassing to remember I sight vocally (I can’t stop it, it just happens). When I called my teacher “mom”. When my actual mom found a pack of condoms in my school bag. When I started crying during my driving test. When my boss told me off at work because I thought that by “matches” he meant some sport games rather than actual fire-ignition devices. I hate it almost as much as I hate you. The thing is, you can be so useless, not in like a funny useless way, but in an in-the-way kind of way. You are always in the way, like a broken chair in the hallway: I am so tired of trying to jump over you, to get my toes stuck on you and to get hurt. Why do you keep hurting me? I’m tired of trying to prove you I can be alone, and I am also tired of having my happiness tied to yours for some reason. I want you to be miserable without me, I want to be happy on my own. Why is it so difficult for you to understand that?

You told me tassel hyacinths’ bulbs are delicious with boiled potatoes. You would carry an empty basket as we would go out in the field, and whenever you’d see their protruding blue heads you would carefully dig around them (they’re always in a group, tassel hyacinths, growing around pavements and lampposts when the sun comes out in April) and take their root in your hands. Lampascione, it is called, the single root of a tassel hyacinth. We spend hours cleaning them with a toothbrush, crouching on the side of the torrent. You have secured a small net to the bed of the water stream hoping to catch some trout, so we clean and we wait.

You never look at me. You carefully brush each bulb and you forget that I am here. It makes my heart ache in a way that I don’t completely understand: it reminds me of the mild bitterness of the lampascioni when you preserve them in oil and salt. It’s the same bitterness that I see in your eyes sometimes, as the sky becomes brighter and brighter, when the clouds start to dissipate without taking your nebulous thoughts with them. You died in a way that I will always find nonsensical; you fell and broke two vertebrae in your back, and then you decided to die. You didn’t even wait for a trout to bait on the small river shrimps we had left in the net. You waved goodbye from your hospital bed and I was just so sure I was going to see you tomorrow.

This time, you have decided to fry the lampascioni we have collected: we leave them to soak for two hours, then we sit down at the kitchen table and with a knife each we carve a cross. The incision is deep and the bulbs open like rosebuds. You fill the skillet with olive oil and wait until it’s hot: the lampascioni sizzle and open up even more, a fully blossomed flower bouquet. You tell me to mash the boiled potatoes with a fork, and I obey: you let the oil from the fried bulbs slide through the kitchen sink, and you carefully place each flower on top of the mash. We eat outside. It’s cold enough that it feels nice to be eating hot and fatty food; it’s warm enough that you are wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt stained slightly by the cooking oil. You have a hat on your head that is slightly too big for you: amongst the food and the trees, the vast blue sea of tassel hyacinths, on that sun-bleached jute deck chair, you don’t look that strong anymore.

I'm exhausted today. I am just –

I think about you
and about that one time
I was bleeding on your
bed
and you threw a damp towel at me…

And sent me home.

You made me think I was the difficult one, and I accepted it.

I was; truly, really.

I should have known that you didn’t have good intentions because you’d never cook for me. You would sporadically buy a bag of crisps, and after you fucked me you would kick me out saying: “You should probably hurry, my dad will be home soon”.

I met your dad once, and I introduced myself smiling, shyly, you know, like teenagers do, with my backpack full of books and my panties all the way up my ass because I had to dress so quickly and I had worn them on the wrong side. Well, your dad looked at me and didn’t shake my hand, didn’t smile. He didn’t do

anything.

Trauma has its own way of evolving and hiding. We would rarely talk about “bad things” at home, and would substitute them with anything happy we had at hand. And so, you hid in all the little cracks of my body and you poisoned me little by little, slowly, until I forgot how bad you were. When you came to apologize to me, years later, we listened to some Italian music in your car, and I realized I didn’t know who you were.