2004

I started the year changing the blog pink and somehow ended it changing more than the blog. #

Yuri is waiting and Mom has already shouted my name once, so naturally this is when I decide to write about an entire year. I’m dressed already, which is the only reason this is even possible. Pink, black, silver earrings, Angel, blonde hair cooperating for once. The little bag is on the bed and no, the phone does not fit properly. We have had twelve months to solve this engineering problem and apparently nobody has.

2004 was the year I turned twenty, which still looks strange written down. It was the first full year where school wasn’t sitting behind everything and I think that changed my weeks more than I expected. Friday and Saturday stopped feeling like the reward at the end of the school week and became part of the structure of life itself. I went out constantly. Milano, dinners, drinks, taxis, clubs, ridiculous water prices, beautiful clothes, shoes I regretted approximately two hours after insisting they were comfortable. Franchino, Ricky Le Roy, techno, progressive, hardcore. The Stunned Guys, Tommyknocker, Nosferatu, Promo, Endymion, Neophyte, The Viper. Edo sending files from Lecco and behaving as though my musical education is a public service. And house. That was probably the musical surprise. I didn’t replace anything with it. I just found another room.

Then there was the pink. The funniest part is that the year began with me simply being tired of blue and then the whole copying thing made me stubborn about it. Bambolina_fashion_kiss becoming Bambolina_fashion_smack still makes me laugh. SMACK. I am sorry. I know I should have matured by now. I have not. The dolphin became a lion partly because I was annoyed and now I actually love lions, so apparently spite can produce lasting aesthetic development. Sampdoria stayed. Angel stayed. Bambolina definitely stayed. At some point I stopped wanting that girl to admit anything because I realised she could repeat every answer on every test and it still wouldn’t give her the reason behind any of them. Angel is Mom. Bambolina is Yuri. The lion now has its own ridiculous history. A profile is a list. A person is everything that happened before the list.

Valerio appearing on MSN was probably the strangest way for that whole story to become real again. I had never written about him because there genuinely wasn’t a story. We went out once, maybe twice, years ago, and that was it. Then suddenly he appears, shows me his girlfriend’s blog, and I’m staring at all these things that look far too familiar to me. I still don’t think he meant to cause any drama. He seemed as confused as anybody. Maybe that’s why the whole thing was so surreal.

Summer was Loano. July, August, September. Three months that sounded endless before they started and lasted approximately seven minutes once I was inside them. I turned twenty there. Yuri came for holidays. I saw Dad more because Genova was suddenly nearby instead of being a weekend decision competing with Milano. That mattered more than I realised it would. During the rest of the year I’ve gone to Genova less. Saturday nights here started winning. I don’t love admitting that, but it’s true. Summer gave some of that time back. Dad, Tia, sea, ordinary dinners, nothing dramatic enough for a film and exactly important enough for real life.

Yuri and I reached three years this month. I still don’t want to write the private parts here. I like that boundary. He gave me Bambolina and somehow the name escaped from our relationship into MSN, usernames, the blog, people who have never even met him. But the signature here never changed. That’s funny to me. The public version of me became Bambolina while the person who sits down after everybody has gone home still signs Eclipse.

Mom is shouting again. Yuri just called. I have six minutes.

So that’s 2004. Pink. Hardcore. House. Loano. Milano. Genova. Yuri. Dad. Mom and Angel. Hikari. Marico. Erick. Mark. Edo blinking on MSN. Franchino’s voice in dark rooms. Shopping bags on my floor. Four biscuits with tea. Too many taxis. Too many shoes. Too many hours spent changing three pixels of a layout nobody else would notice.

Twenty years old. Still here. Happy 2005.

Remember me, Eclipse.