2003

I thought this year would be about finishing school. apparently years don’t accept outlines. #

There are thirteen minutes left of 2003 and Mom has already told me twice to get off the computer because `”people are waiting.”` They are. Yuri is waiting. I am dressed. My hair is done. I am wearing blue, obviously, and yes, I used Angel again, so technically I can leave as soon as I stop typing.

I wanted to write this first.

I finished school this year.

That sentence is still strange.

For so long school was not something I did, it was part of the calendar itself. September meant going back. June meant stopping. Monday morning had a shape. Friday afternoon had a feeling. Then suddenly there was a last version of all of it. Last normal lesson, last tests, maturità, the horrible waiting and studying and everybody telling me I would be fine as though knowing something logically automatically instructs your stomach to calm down.

I was fine.

Then I turned nineteen.

Nineteen is good. I recommend it so far.

I stayed blonde for most of the year and probably committed several crimes against hair care. I wore enough blue to make it an administrative category: Napoli blue, Samp blue, sea blue, baby blue, electric blue, midnight blue, whatever blue I saw and decided I needed. Every month Eclixar changed clothes with me. Twelve layouts. Twelve! That is ridiculous even by my standards.

Music changed too, or maybe expanded is the better word. More techno. More progressive. Ricky Le Roy. Mario Più. Zicky. Picotto. Franchino becoming so attached to certain nights that I can’t imagine remembering 2003 without hearing that voice somewhere behind the memory.

Hardcore never went away.

The Stunned Guys, Tommyknocker, Nosferatu, Neophyte, Promo, Endymion, The Viper. The music I can recognise physically before I have finished identifying it intellectually. Edo sending files from Lecco at stupid hours, ordering me to listen, arguing with my opinions even when we basically agree.

And yes, Britney.

And Christina.

Still.

Nobody confiscated my hardcore licence.

Yuri and I reached two years.

Two years.

He turned Bambolina from a word I would never have chosen for myself into a nickname I now type into MSN without thinking. That’s funny. At the beginning of the year I was still mostly Eclipse everywhere. Now people message `”Bambolina”` and I answer automatically.

But this place is still Eclipse.

It always will be.

That’s why the signature stays.

There were girls this year too. Lots of them, actually. Splinder girls. MSN girls. Some became proper friends, or at least whatever kind of friendship exists when you know somebody’s thoughts and boyfriend problems but have never heard her voice. Some were funny. Some exhausting. Some disappeared. Some copied little things from Eclixar. A header here, a phrase there, sidebar headings, the little line above posts.

Then Valerio appeared on MSN.

I hadn’t written about him because there wasn’t some giant Valerio story. We went out once or twice. That was it. Years do not need retroactive romance just because somebody’s name reappears.

He told me he had a girlfriend.

News to me.

He showed me her blog.

And that became one of the stupidest Internet arguments of my year.

I still remember opening it and thinking first, that’s familiar, then scrolling and thinking, no, seriously, that’s familiar. Layout pieces, wording, little choices, nicknames.

Bambolina.

That was the one.

Because Bambolina wasn’t something I had selected from a nickname generator. Yuri calls me that. It had a story attached. I hadn’t even known this girl existed until that night, and suddenly there was the word sitting inside a page that already looked much too familiar.

I challenged her.

She denied copying.

Then came `”Odio la falsità e l’ipocrisia”` and I nearly fell off the chair from the irony.

At the time I was furious.

Now?

I still think what I thought.

I just don’t want to spend New Year’s Eve angry about HTML.

That’s probably the useful thing I learned from all those copycat episodes. People can take the surface of something surprisingly easily. A colour. A graphic. A phrase. A nickname. Even a writing habit.

But context doesn’t travel with Ctrl+C.

Somebody can type Bambolina.

They cannot make it mean Yuri saying it.

Somebody can use blue.

They cannot make it the sea in Genova, or Dad, or Tia, or Napoli and Samp somehow occupying different corners of the same colour in my head.

Somebody can write about perfume.

They cannot reproduce Mom walking through the hallway in Angel while three colleagues sit downstairs with folders and coffee and I stand upstairs thinking `-.-` because I have to cross their meeting to go out.

They can list The Stunned Guys.

They cannot reproduce Edo’s orange MSN window blinking at 2:11 AM from Lecco with nothing but:

`LISTEN`

They cannot copy the exact feeling of getting a 10 in physics and then going out Friday night.

Or finishing the maturità.

Or being nineteen.

Or Hikari.

Or Yuri.

Or my father.

Or Tia.

Or the train to Genova.

Or my blue Mac, which has been sitting here since 1997 watching me turn from one version of myself into another.

That’s the difference between a page and an archive.

The page is HTML.

The archive is why the HTML is there.

Okay.

Mom just shouted my name again.

MSN is blinking.

Fireworks have started early outside because apparently clocks are optional tonight.

Yuri is waiting.

I am blonde, blue, wearing too much Angel and still sitting at the computer.

Very 2003.

See you next year.

Remember me, Eclipse.