your first birthday without mela is no birthday at all. a birthday consecrates your advent into the world and all of its upcoming toil, for the moment you are plucked from the womb, your first present is a promise: from cradle to grave, the travails of life will spin you divergently, wholeheartedly, passionately on a carousel of humanity—sometimes it is beautiful, oft times it is ugly—so a birthday should nod to your successes, to what you have achieved with your lot in life even if that has just been to exist. existing should be enough.
what your father celebrates is a decade of your shortcomings. he is unsurprisingly catholic. for all he provides you on the onus of his empty, collection-bought platitudes, he will not look at you with favor; and when he does open his vile mouth, he is always bitching or preaching or some dense amalgamation of both. time after time, he reminds you that you are nothing. you already know you are nothing. you’d think he wants you in the dirt in mela’s place if you didn’t know any better, and sometimes you don’t. you do have to try, but at least that man makes it easy. ( you’ll make it easy for him, too. you’re nothing, after all. )
of course the two of you fight again. he crosses a line when he brings up your mother, so you storm into the streets with your heaviest coat to compensate for your puffy eyes and thin skin, thinking you’re thick as thieves with the boys who make merry to receive you instead. a tutting amando tosses you a banana from his bunch—only minimally bruised—before he flips his blond hair and flashes the coolest grin you’ve ever seen. your heart flutters. ( and you think, doesn’t this have to be something? )
yes, you concur, your birthday passes nice and easy out here with the lawless. so does the one after that, and the one after that. the local boys, they think of you! they understand you! they care for you as you do them. the younger ones, they even count on you, which fills your chest with inexplicable bliss. you have a reason for being. you may be crude, gangly, nothing and unworldly, but you pride yourself on knowing one truth: friendship is a universal language, one that pays back in dividends.
eternally grateful, you will give back without question. what you crave more than any bread in your stomach is their approval; as long as you have that, you feel utterly invincible. you give, and give, because that’s just fine—your love is ferocious and you have enough to go around. you never, ever want your friends to feel lacking. you never want them to feel like nothing. and what’s more—by giving, you kind of feel like something. it all works out. it is honest and ideal. ( this is one thing you are good for. it might be the only thing you are good for. )
on your next memorable birthday, you are alone and boxed by metal bars, bleakly staring at a popcorn ceiling with one working eye. you squash the bubbling panic with sleep before any idiotic doubt rears its head. ( you don’t like to talk about that place. )
your next one is even worse. you hate that one. you retch into another gutter after lapping up its groundwater, faint from hunger without knowing the hour or day. it doesn’t matter, though. at age fifteen, you have given up on life.
you gave them everything and it still wasn’t enough. it serves you right. no matter how many birthdays roll by, you’ll never be enough.
if it were boorish pride that kept you from going back to that house, to that roof over your head and decent bed to sleep in, everything would be easier—but pride it is not. it is only the fact, the cold consequence, the fate that you are nothing, and resigned to die alone as nothing. ( with nowhere to arrive and nowhere else to go back to, you close your grimy eye and dream of your mother. )
“so now that abbacchio’s thirty or whatever,” twenty-one, you son of a— “next up is me, yeah? just think: one more month and i’ll have another year on ya, fugo! what’re you guys gonna do for me, huh?”
libeccio’s slate green door swings into something like a home, but you don’t have a solid point of reference. maybe this is that point of reference. your bizarre motley of five is rowdy as hell, but doubly warm with a criminal dash of deadly. fate notwithstanding, you like where you are now. at times your past begets nausea, but every day it gets further behind you, even if the dull ache in your chest is chronic, or you spot amando on the streets in muted impersonal passing. what is that if not healing?
you bounce a glance around the room. buccellati’s clipped huff, mista’s unconventional logic, abbacchio’s curt acknowledgement, fugo’s resigning sigh—your lips tug into a grin behind your soup spoon. you’ve found better company. you want to spend the rest of your birthdays giving to back to these people. despite your impish prodding, they don’t have to do a thing next month. they are your present—and with luck, your future.
mista, you hear the deep rumble of abbacchio’s voice again, half a lunch later, after that mouse-faced florist crumples to buccellati’s feet, before you leave, make sure you put that rock back.
