Roman page:The first

What could bring greater happiness to a simple family than the arrival in this world of their first-born? This must have been the reason of my uncommon selfishness and isolating tendency over the years, otherwise a quiet kid, maybe too quiet and too good for a human existence. I do not like and have never liked to stand out, nor do I have the courage of stronger confrontations with friends or classmates. Being pretty fussy throughout my childhood gave “momma-tina” the right to scold me, whenever it was appropriate:

“Mangy goat,” she used to call me every time I refused to eat what she asked me to.

A skinny and dreamy kid, maybe a little more stubborn than the others, who has believed all this life that everything is a competition, a competition with his brothers, peers, friends, and even with people on the street. I thought and still think that the struggle for existence is a competition, even if not everybody is a competitor. I always thought I was the pathfinder, as I was the first-born. In time, I shrank into myself,  I became ever more immersed in reading and music, more introverted, without understanding why slowly, I broke with people. Because of my selfishness, I became a closed library, a memory that serves no purpose, where nobody reads and nobody comes; my spirit closed me in my identity shell and I have never escaped. Nobody has ever been able to open this library; maybe in my subconscious, I have always wished for this thing to happen, but it was impossible for the others. A special and sensitive soul that no one notices; maybe I do not know how to present it either, like the library where I live, and no one will ever know.

I sit on the lakeside and look with pleasure at the face reflected in it; I like to dream and especially to love with unlimited passion. It is holiday today, it is Easter, however we came to swim, or just to see the nature surrounding the lake, without which we cannot stay one day, especially during the hot, summer day that have already begun. Barefoot, by the still cold water that does not let you get in with pleasure, at most to wash your feet only, I leave my brand new shoes just received as a gift, and greedily breathe the few moments of happiness.

Maybe I should have been a poet, I used to write poems, but I have alsways been afraid to read them to others; however, love overcame any obstacle in this case as well. A blond girl, unique in the whole world for me and for that space/time, helped me to become myself for a short time. It is true, the more you love, the more inhuman the separation is, painful and so hard to forget, if ever. I never came to be a poet; my stubbornness and selfishness made me wish for more than I was able to, I wanted to be a scientist. Unfortunately, despite the success of an extremely difficult exam that I took, I came to be just an anonymous electrician, then an anonymous father of a family, then an anonymous pensioner, and then I no longer know what kind of anonymity I would be.

The shoes, ah, yes, the shoes! I forgot them on the waterside, and we all three had to stay until one o'clock at night in the park, fearing of getting a good beating. Our parents—glad though we were well after a day of being worried sick about us—even if they had forgotten that beating for a while somewhere around the house, they kept it close at hand still, knowing they would need it someday for sure.