Juvenile delirium by Stefano Maria Palombi

Juvenile delirium Short stories written of times past.

Stefano Maria Palombi Edition 02/2022

Juvenile delirium Short stories written of times past.

I was young and hadn’t a clue on how to go about it. Every once in a while I’d write a short story or a delusional monologue. I’d sometimes paint fish, faces and angels. I’d framed a page from “on the road” that ended like this: “I’d nothing to give anyone except for my confusion”.

In Memory Of.

Tony Formichello. He’d use that fucking video8 for anything. He’d knick the tapes anyway, and with this wimpy excuse he’d also take other people’s fucking lives. Tony Formichello what a shitty name. Back then it was just us, him, me and his scruffy camera. There were times when we’d get back home after our night shift and we’d get called buggers by the dope heads/ junkies of the Tufello. It’d piss the shit out of me while he’d enthusiastically strut away while filming. Tony Formichello, the dude who wouldn’t go to sleep without having to go over the day. He wouldn’t swallow back the shit he’d puked up in twenty four hours. I would open my eyes and the first thing I’d see was the bright red dot. It wasn’t the sun at dawn, nor a bell end it was the control light of his damn camera in action. Wednesday June twenty ninth at eight thirty-four: I gave him a hard beating. I then had to watch it all in slow motion. Tony Formichello there’s no way you can fucking forget him, ever. Those flares which he’d insist would “eventuallybebackinfashion”. And now, all they want to know is if he was handsome.

Hard to say. His asshole looking face hidden behind that fucking camera of his. Quite possibly. All of my girlfriends ended up doing backflips with him, no exceptions. It is all well recorded. They now come to me because they want to know about his early struggles. We’d bite each other’s head off for a can of corned beef and for a bowl of Roman “puntarelle” salad we’d pull our hair out. They want to know everything about him. How old was he when he stopped wearing shorts, the length of his member or how deep his back thingy was. I’ve been offered money by some shameless people for his unreleased work, aren’t thousands of kms of film shot not enough, I wonder. As if I haven’t had enough of switching the TV on, I look at myself wearing jocks and a vest or while washing my jewels in a bidet. It is all followed by criticism and a debate. What the fucking fuck! I mean not even on New year’s eve? Or on Palm Sunday? Tony Formichello, questions asked over and over. And the only thing that comes to mind is that the one and only request to him at the time was why the hell couldn’t he just get the fuck out.

The power of thought

To destroy everything. That’s what we wanted. Closets, cars, apartments, faces. We loved one another and our favorite tune was Destination anywhere. There was only one girl in the group. I used to kiss her. Everybody kissed her. When we used to run through the subway cars yelling “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare touch us!”, I felt as I’ve never felt since. In any case, seven months later we all wound up in jail for our vacation. In the beginning, things went smoothly there as well. We turned the mess hall upside down and blew up the director’s pride, a brand new 28-inch screen TV. They split us up. When I got out, I decided to work alone. Small stuff to start with: public telephones, a few BMW deflectors, a couple of shop windows. Then, also some more ambitious stuff, which I’d rather not talk about right now. I couldn’t sleep at night, so I would ride my Motobecane through the dark in search of some nice wall to write on or some nice shop window to break.

It was cold and, without a windshield, my face got thrashed. But that was OK with me. I joined a band that—would you believe it—were called the Black ‘n Deckers. We played like shit, but our lyrics were great. The guy who wrote them woke up one morning with an arrest warrant for breakfast. He sent us a couple of pretty good songs after he went in hiding, but that was it. So everything fell apart. By the way, in those days I used to hang out with a girl I liked being with. But it didn’t last long. I threw a fancy chair out the window of her mother’s house and so she ended up hiding out as well. Riding around on my beast all the time, I wound up getting bilateral pneumonia. Was stuck in bed for three months, always thinking the same thing over and over: how to make the ceiling lamp fall with just the power of thought. Now I’m an executive in a big multinational corporation. I live with a hamster and six cactuses. At night, I often stay in the office and play Lucio Battisti’s The best at full volume. This is how my story ends, without an ending. Actually, I might have told you a few more things. But the urge to get up and throw the typewriter against the wall is too strong.

He was there

You were calm. You said to him: «You forgot your toothbrush.» And the bleachers with your fans on them roared their approval. His suitcase always heavier, and you always lighter. It was pure legerdemain. You had told him the night before, as you were driving home from work. There was the usual procession of tired faces, the U2 were screaming, and you spoke softly. He lowered the volume. He hadn’t heard you correctly, or so he hoped. You repeated it all a second time. He was silent, then sweet. Then he got upset, then sweet again. But if he was Belgium, you by now were New Zealand. Thousands of miles between you. Now you felt as in a movie, you felt like an asshole, you felt good. To get back home and collapse on the couch, go out at three o’clock in the morning, eat with your hands, go to the bathroom with the door left open, listen to the same song on the same record twelve times in a row. That was life. What had you been up to till then?

You could hear him moving about the bedroom, jerkily. While you were lying on your stomach on the sofa, with that friendly ass of yours facing the sky. Suddenly the door of the house closed. Then you got up. You took a couple of steps, and you thought of a million things all at the same time. But not of me.

The gnat’s waltz

Sometimes I ask myself how it was possible. Whether it actually happened. Then I look at my burnt hands and all doubts can go get fucked. OK, alright, I wasn’t exactly a little angel. In any case, there’s no denying it, I had done it. In the days that followed the accident, I was questioned many times. But I remember one time well. A slice of my moon, like a light bulb, flooded the room with a shy light. While outside, everybody’s fat and brazen-faced moon gave the night a gray tint. I was lying in my bed, my eyes open and my hands wrapped in white bandages.

They spoke amongst themselves, as if I were dead. Then, from time to time, as if addressing my spirit, they posed a few questions. But spirits, as we know, are capricious, so I didn’t answer. I had more pressing things to do. To sing, for example, the Valzer del moscerino, the gnat’s waltz. The beginning was fantastic : «Peppone was busy snoring in a big garden and upon his nose landed a...» Beautiful. Almost better than running naked down the hall. I knew perfectly well why I had done it, and maybe that evening I would even have told them, if only they had asked me. But they didn’t. They kept asking me strange things, questions I wouldn’t be able to answer even now. In any case, I don’t think they would have understood. Life trains you every day to get buggered. And the fact that I had set fire to the kindergarten after a four-eyed teacher had put me in a corner because I had written «Lazio shits» on a wall, might have seemed like overreacting to them.

Perhaps you cried

They had left you alone finally, it seemed you were getting better, two days had passed since you stopped yelling inanities. Your son was sad and embarrassed, he didn’t recognize you any longer. Good God, seventy-three years old, all day long standing on the bed gesticulating, raging mockingly against the world! Your daughter-in-law was shocked. She didn’t speak, was probably busy wondering whether your illness was hereditary or not and what might be the implications if it was. The only ones to be amused, besides yourself of course, were the twins, who took advantage of the confusion to wreak unhindered their domestic havoc. You spoke eloquently, especially in the morning; then, to be sincere, towards evening one couldn’t understand what the hell you were saying. Whether you were happy in those moments, I do not know, what is sure is that you were alive, damn alive. Your days were numbered, they said.

Then, suddenly, you were mute for forty-eight hours or longer, with sad eyes you watched the radio sing. The worst, they thought, was over. I can almost see you getting out of bed with your favorite pajama on and wandering furtively about the house, with wavering heart and naked feet. One sentence kept coming back in your monologues. It had to do with a fir tree. You were challenging injustices and defending a tree. No one understood. In a sixteenth opened drawer, there are the keys, amidst bras and underwear. In a corner of the terrace, sad and in bad shape, a bored fir tree stands in its pot. Your son would never forgive himself for not having had a clue. Six minutes had yet to pass and you were already traveling. It was nice to drive after such a long time, with your best friend sitting next to you and a song by the Boss in your ears. You drove slowly, not out of caution but because you were curious. You felt well and the street was full of things to look at. They saw you yell from the open window, words drowned out by the music and noises. The last houses, the curves, the straight stretches. The plain, the hills, and the first trees. Now you were speeding along. The air was warm and melancholic, winter was pulling into platform three.

The house with the pink hayloft was still there, thank god you must have thought, two little girls and a cat: six gray eyes upon you. The shades of green, of red, of blue. In the fields, among the trees, in the sky. What a sneeze! Bless you, old man. “A few more miles and we’re there” you will have murmured to your silent traveling companion. The woods were there patiently waiting for you, the wind smelled of wet grass and dry leaves. Finding the right spot and digging the hole was child’s play, although many wondered how you had managed in your condition. Knowing you, I know you must have been moved upon seeing your friend finally freed of its pot and with its roots sunk into the moist soil, bending along with its brothers to the caresses of an ancient northwesterly wind. Perhaps you cried, for your and our wasted days, prisoners in an earthenware pot. Perhaps you cried, but when I found you you were smiling. You were smiling and had ceased to breathe.

The sky’s orange color

We were riding down a dirt road. Shaken, silent. Sitting in the back of the family pick-up truck. I was minding my own business, by which I mean thinking about her thighs. The little one was smoking an elm twig. He inhaled without smiling and then opened his mouth. A small cloud of vapor came out just as it was supposed to. It was cold that morning too. But the previous days had been even worse. My father hadn’t slept a wink. He understood everything a little ahead of time. I thought about it later, many times. It must have been hard for him. Hearing those things, having those pictures running through his head. Sure, a lot fewer pains in the ass, but also a lot of surprises lost. And now that time has passed and the years start poking fun at me, I discover that I resemble him. And this strange movement inside scares me. So then I think about when we were different. Then I think about us that morning swept by that north wind while we were going down into the valley towards the olive grove. Our olive tree grove.

I’m sure I remember the truck stopping because it hit something, maybe a big rock. Slap in the face on its way, I thought. Instead my big sister got away with it. Didn’t even get a nasty look. We looked at one another and took in a deep breath of fear. We were approaching the big old ones with slow, heavy steps. Trees my grandfather’s grandfather had planted one by one. Dig a twelve-inch hole, just deep enough so the node sticks out, then you cover the roots with soil and top it with manure. Make sure the manure is old and ripe. The little one got off the truck and we, cowards that we were, followed behind him. A few more steps and we stopped again. He was walking. I could see his shoulders, his arms alongside his body, his hands opening and closing like fireflies. He reached the first one. Walked around it, touched it gently with his hands, leaned his head on it. Once, I had fallen from the barn roof and he had done the same to me. Then, a scream. The ice had frozen it through and through. I don’t know what happened right after that. I only remember the damned noise the chainsaws made. My father stood there, my mother a few steps behind him, watching the execution. He stayed there crouched, while they fell. I don’t know what I felt in those moments. The vibrations of the chainsaw, which I was barely managing to hold on to, were making me tremble on the outside and calming me inside. It was cold, that I remember well. But we stayed there all day long. Until the orange color of the sky became first purple and then black. I loved my father. Yes, I loved him all right. And yet, every time I see an olive tree, my first thought is not for him, but for her thighs.

Let me have

It was a perfect plan. We were strong, and he was a fink. Zero doubts. The verdict was unanimous. The meeting ended quickly. The championship soccer games were on TV. I got back home with a heavy heart.The night before is never very easy. You get up all the time, make sure your tools are alright, check the alarm clock, and then lie down again. You can’t wait for tomorrow to come, even though you know it might be the last of your tomorrows. Usually, I wind up not getting any shut-eye at all, but the next morning I’m ready for action. I was alone. The others were split in two groups of two each. We had taken our positions. We didn’t have long to wait. Calm and carefree, the bastard came out. The lives he had stolen didn’t seem to weigh upon him at all. “It’s better this way”, I thought as I got him in my sights. “Everything will be easier.” Three of us shot almost at the same time from three different positions.

He remained standing holding his stomach, with his eyes wide open and a dumbfounded face. He wanted to pretend he hadn’t been expecting it, the damned bastard. “A liar and a fink to the very last”, I yelled at him. When I heard the body hit the ground I was already straddling my motorbike. No one behind me except his dead body and my conscience. I left the motorcycle and continued on foot. Daylight savings time had just started and the evenings were long and sweet, like kisses when one isn’t making love. And I felt comfortable in the pages of a history book that got longer and longer with our every job. At home, I would have wanted to tell her everything but I couldn’t. So I wanted to make love, but she couldn’t. I got into bed, I thought we had been perfect. No casualties, enemy wiped out. A job done by the book. I fell asleep immediately. The morning light woke me, while I was lunging with the ball at my feet towards the other team’s goal. I turned to my right automatically. As usual, my love had put her love token there: a tray with tea and newspapers. I didn’t even have to look, because I found him on the front page. The guy we had offed was not the fink, the dealer, the murderer, but a damned piano teacher, married, with two little children and a third one on its way. He was right to have been surprised, I thought. Then I got up, she was in the kitchen. I joined her and prayed to her on my knees to let me have her.

Hatred

I started to write because I hate those pieces of shit sons of psychologists who write bad stories, stories full of shit. They, the shits, don’t even know what shit looks like, shit! They are young, pretend to be tough and one-up one another to see who talks the most bullshit. They talk about people shot dead without ever having seen the eyes of someone shot dead with a handgun next to a gasoline pump, close to nineteen-hundred-seventy-seven. They talk of rape and extreme sex in their stories but, if a woman takes their prick into her mouth, they think: «Oh my God, but this sex isn’t safe!» They hate the parents who brought them into this world, into this damned world, and—what is more—who did so plainly without taking any precautions. Their hatred is therefore for you, parents, who ask some important friend, someone above all suspicion, to make sure such hatred is well reviewed. Go to hell, you fakes. You and your computers and your little rooms out of which you bring out copies of copies of copies. Beware, because the hatred you tell about is fake, whereas mine is damn real.

A cobweb a day

I hoped she would continue to keep silent. I had to think only about myself. I wasn’t desperate, but tired. And there was a tune that kept being rehearsed in my ears. A few chords and then back from the top. I had almost forgotten about the appointment at the doctor’s, maybe I was getting better. I realized I was missing the lemon verbena, that’s what it was, as I opened the windows that give onto my terrace. In the bathroom, in front of the mirror, I looked at myself, I was so different from the way I thought of myself. I blamed the mirror and smiled with satisfaction at my fantasy. I read one page a day, my thoughts hid in between the words and, mockingly, led me elsewhere. The word had got out or maybe it was just my paranoia: the phone, in any case, wasn’t ringing.

To scream it all out for everyone to hear? I didn’t do it. What did I want? To sit at the foot of my mountain and listen to it whisper. I was going down the stairs. Good God, more bills! What had I said to her that put her off? I couldn’t remember clearly. I had rehearsed the scene too many times and now was confused. I hoped she would continue to keep silent. Liar. She had been scared but was ready to fight, maybe. It was difficult looking around without bleeding, she was in everything. I had to think only about myself. Like the little spider that lives in the vase with the fat plants, who each day is forced to invent a new cobweb because some asshole who is bigger than he is goes there and destroys the one he just made. I was the asshole. That stubborn little spider, in fact, kept fixing the threads of his maison to my favorite chair. When my life suddenly became similar to his, with a cobweb to invent every day, and an asshole bigger than you ready to destroy it, I decided to make him a gift of my chair and changed habits. The thirty-square foot terrace was too small for the both of us. I had a hard time walking, would lean against the wall between wisteria leaves and punk posters and look at the women and children. I would have wanted a picture of myself, but wasn’t within striking distance of a photographer who could have immortalized me. More music inside me, I had so much to say. I interviewed myself, but the questions were always predictable and banal, like those they put to soccer players. Or perhaps they seemed that way to me because, in reality, I never managed to say what I really wanted to say. But I respected myself because I had never betrayed anyone. The first lights, shy like fireflies, old men and young boys who danced while chasing a spellbinding ball. I was with them. And also elsewhere, along the crest of a pink mountain, among the waves and laughs of a sea crossing, in the silence of love with my woman. No, whatever happened, I wasn’t going to die. The light had changed, I looked at my hands and laughed.

Stefano like me

The office is on the third floor. The nameplate on the door is a bit crooked. Others don’t notice it, but I do. Every morning I think I should have it fixed. Every morning I find it in front of me. It has my name and «Attorney at Law» written on it. I don’t have many clients. There is Walter, who is accused of being a part of an armed band. His case has often kept me awake. Then I discovered that I thought about him mostly so that I might think about his woman. Her name is Mara and she comes to visit me every week. We talk about Walter. About how he is doing, what he might need. Sometimes I have a letter for her. Often she comes with a little child. He is their son and his name is Stefano. Like me.

I do the same things with him that my grandfather used to make me do when I came to visit him here, in the office. First a little tour to say hello to the secretary and some smuggler in the waiting room, then to ransack the stationary closet, packed with notebooks, red and blue pencils, pens, erasers. I like repeating the ritual. like seeing how Mara looks at me when I hold her son in my arms. Mara has beautiful eyes. And I think about her eyes often. But then I immediately think about Walter. Only a slight change in route caused my fate to be different from his. I go to visit him on Thursdays. We talk about Mara and Stefano. About how they are doing, what they might need. Sometimes, I have a letter or some pictures to give to him. And then I do with him the same things my grandfather used to do with his clients. We talk about soccer, about books, about cell mates. No questions about why or how. In this way, between a comment about the Lazio team’s performance in the B series and one about Queneau, the truth comes out. And I know how to defend them. Mara comes to see me ever more often. And ever more often her eyes meet mine. Perhaps I’ve spotted a weak point in the prosecution’s argument. While I was sleeping, the tack the defense should follow seemed clear to me. In the same moment, the fact that I am falling in love with her, with Mara , also seemed clear. Yesterday I spoke with a witness whose words could prove decisive. I asked Mara what she thought about it. She answered that she cares about me. A few evenings ago, while I was fumbling about the office looking for a place to put a present from an old client of my grandfather’s, the doorbell rang. It was her. She saw me holding the chicken in my hand— it being the present—and burst out laughing like crazy.

I had never seen her laugh. I had missed the show of the year. I am putting almost all of my time into Walter’s case. The determination with which I defend him will be decisive. I feel it, everything depends entirely on me. While we went up in the elevator, just the two of us, we found ourselves very close to one another. Her eyes were shining. I plunge ahead without asking myself any questions. In front of the mirror, I rehearse my harangue. And in bed, I try to imagine how it might be being there with her. The day of the trial is approaching, and Mara is moving closer and closer to me. Sweetness is giving in to anger. The idea of this love with an expiration date written on it, as if it were milk or mozzarella, makes me angry. The days have passed rapidly. The trial is tomorrow. Mara has asked me to sleep at her place. I accepted, but didn’t go. I spent the night yelling in silence and crying without shedding a tear. Then, brandishing a screwdriver, I ran up the stairs that lead to my office. I loosened the screws and straightened the nameplate. Breathing heavily, I went away. Tomorrow, Walter would be a free man.

“Hey!” (Rome Romania)

More than to grab and have her, I wanted her to translate the words of that song for me. And then, yes, I would have grabbed and had her. I had written a poem for her, for me, for the Tiber. She said it was sad, the poem. The river, instead, had liked it. The days were black or white like the notebooks in which I wrote, like her hair and her skin. She didn’t know how to swim in their sea, I said, but in mine, yes. I had written words for her. And she liked those words, she needed them and kept them close at hand in time of war and in time of peace. She who never spent time alone, was left alone at times with those words. Maybe she loved them, maybe she loved me. We spoke a language of our own, made of sky, armor, miracle, incredible, beyond.

No one could understand, at times even we didn’t understand. Strange things happened. I thought of the two of us flying over the city and Chagall and his Bella arrived in Rome. In front of that painting, I was him, she was Bella, sad for the sky. When we spoke, we spoke about ourselves, the world around us disappeared, the table levitated with teapot, cups, and gin tonic. We were really dangerous together. She walked just behind me, like an Indian bride, «I don’t know why», she said with a thin voice and smile. And I didn’t know why, whenever she didn’t feel like eating, I too had no desire to do so. The nights were hell and heaven, like an African voyage between too much life and too much death. Then, of a sudden, harmony arrived and I felt my heart slow down, almost cease to beat. I thought it was a miracle and watched her turn into me and looked for a mirror in which to see myself with her hair and her lips worn by my kisses. They were blessed moments and we were to pay for them dearly. She was the outside, I the inside, in our games, our battles, our ring. I carried her in my books, on my trips, in my poems, or perhaps it was them that had led me to her. A chocolate-flavored kiss was the prize. She would look at me and say «How are you? How you are!» In those days I was looking for a story to tell but the words that came out from deep inside me were only for her. Then, all of a sudden, a wall would divide us, I would send her miles away from me, she would start to walk about with bulletproof glass all around her, she would wear the most precious and resistant

armor and climb on stage wearing the hardest and most impenetrable of masks. To leave her there or to fight her, the challenge was always the same. From time to time, she would let a luminous pearl drop and I would dive headlong to gather it. The further I sank, the more the water was warm and transparent. Because it was not the sea’s but her own abyss. The leaves of plane trees, of my plane trees, had known the sky and now knew the earth. Just like us. I who had understood everything, no longer understood anything. She who had felt everything, what was she feeling now? I who had just put away my sword, like the archangel atop Castel sant’Angelo, unsheathed my pen again and started to write. Without knowing whether to abandon us there or carry us to safety. I listened to music, to the same piece repeated a thousand times, and branded it with our initials. She didn’t understand my anger but would smile like an accomplice when I told her that one life wasn’t enough, and gently bit my lips when she kissed me. And I was happy as a diamond digger on pay day. I smiled and she would open her eyes only very slightly and just barely see my smile, and with her eyes she repeated it to me again and again. On one thing we were agreed, it was either all or nothing, death or glory, like the Clash screamed in their song. She was a magnet, everyone wanted her but, for the moment, it was me that she wanted. We had waited a year to speak to one another, she knew that sooner or later it would happen, I knew that everything would be decided in an instant. And that, once the instant had passed, it would never happen again. We toured on foot the alleys of my hometown and of my war as a boy, speaking of her city and of her war as a girl. She hated sadness, the word utopia and my wool gloves understood her better than I did. Whenever I wrote to her, she would try to decipher the words I had crossed-out, certain that the secret to everything lay buried in them.

On the phone she would say «Hey», and I who told her so many things never told her how much I loved hearing that «Hey». We also knew how to laugh, but I would have wanted to taste her tears at least once. She dreamed I was lost in the Amazon forest and instead I had got lost in the forest of my own words, of her doubts, and of their crap world. Truffaut had helped me but there was no one who could really have saved me. It was icy cold on my Vespa and I sang the songs the fans sing on our curved stretch of bleachers, on the south side of the stadium.

One night, after the Nth battle, she held on to me tightly and I thought of the slow, tormented, marvelous path of my mouth, hands, shoulders, of the most hidden and unknown part of me toward her mouth, hands, shoulders, most hidden and unknown part. That thought, I knew it, would always have been with me and kept me alive even on my deathbed.

But today, damn it, it was killing me on an evening that was so full of life. When I caressed her, my hands felt scars that were invisible to the blind hands of others. I had eyes wide open and naked hands and she liked to see me that way. Because she had sought me across so many countries in the world, every night, until there were no nights and no countries left. She was the air I let race in the car window as I sped along. It was a perfumed air, smelling of sky and of earth, of a fragrance that had awakened me, that prevented me from sleeping. I was lit up and the light shone on my face even in the darkness of a funeral. When a cousin’s eyes watched me and understood. We had everything and, therefore, everything to lose, like in that beautiful song by Ben Harper. Our life without us was sweet and terrible, filthy rich and poor as a church mouse, it was no longer the same life. Flashbacks caught you unawares and left you breathless and speechless. And it was that way for both of us. One day, we would meet again in a faraway country, far from this river, from these angels, from this hell. I would wait for her seated at a cafe, she would arrive late, as always, would walk towards me and then?

I always used to ask her «What will you do then? Will you be wearing armor or will you lean over me and, heedless of the world, kiss me this way and that?» And this and that way we kissed. At times I woke up on the warpath, dug up the battle ax, slipped on my tee-shirt with Che and Maradona on it, and set out to launch an attack on the world that stifled me, that wanted to steal my breath away, the air that raced in through my car window. She would say to me, «Fight against them, but don’t destroy us». But in the end it was she who destroyed us, because she forgot the beauty of my words and started to poison herself with the ugliness of my ugliest and most furious ones.

Every time I made a mistake, that I didn’t give her enough time to reach inside my world from the other one outside, the same mocking sign that greeted my faux pas on the computer would appear: «Fatal Error!» But then it would take nothing at all to shoot us back into orbit, into our heavens. I would put on Police on my back at full volume and she would dance, spinning about. Marvelous gypsy, punk, and rebel. I’ve already told you, I became her and she became me. Fausto, the artist beggar, could have exhibited us among the surreal works in his touching, open-air gallery. Who knows what title he would have given us. She had ears like only Africans have, so a doctor told her. I murmured «I am crazy, crazy about you» inside them. And watched my voice fly over the Sahel desert and that flower of a woman called Clarisse and then the shoeless soccer team of the Yassets, all the way up to the highest peak of the Nuba Mountains. We could have killed each other and, without waiting three days, have been resurrected. She was mountain, sea deep, wind of the Cordigliera to me when she would say, whilst in my arms and as she pushed me away, «Ste’, stay, stay with me». When I left I wanted to carry her inside my heart and inside my eyes, but it hadn’t been possible, because she was already there, on the other side of the world, waiting for me. Dressed as a cloud and wrapped in a long French dress from the twenties. She used the word “love” with the same caution and the same respect an explosives expert uses when handling nitroglycerine. I have never given a shit about drugs, and yet, when she was not around, I understood, clearly for the first time, what it means to be without them. It was we who were narcotic. Me and her, she and I. I wrote without pause and without thinking. Without rereading and, in the end, it was almost all true. Because what we had going was a beautiful story. A story easier to write about than to live.

Juvenile delirium Concept: SMP+ and LOLAETLABORA Texts: Stefano Maria Palombi Images: Stefano Maria Palombi Graphic elaboration: LOLAETLABORA www.stefanopalombi.com