Today is my thirty-seventh birthday and there will be no message from you.
Today is also the day I get married. You had said you'd be there, as you always did — punctual, dependable, with that presence of yours that filled a space without invading it. But you won't be here. You will be in a form whose light my eyes cannot see, and I will spend the day looking for you among other people's faces, taking the edge off the pain somewhere between a memory and one glass of prosecco too many.
This isn't grief to get over, Mike. It isn't weakness. It is that when you find beauty and then lose it, a fight against nostalgia begins — a fight no one prepares you for, and whose destination you cannot quite understand.
For years we had a treehouse.
It wasn't a place the world would have chosen. Far from the center, almost always empty, with a reputation suspended somewhere between indifference and prejudice. People who knew us would raise an eyebrow — and we let them keep it raised. Because we had understood something that is hard to understand from the outside: places that are judged badly are often the most honest. That marginality, when you choose it, becomes freedom.
There we were safe from eyes that weighed us, judgments that classified us, the need to always live up to a reputation. Three integrated, respected people allowing themselves the luxury of being imperfect. Of laughing loudly, singing out of tune, getting drunk without making a spectacle of it. Of simply being human.
I remember one night in particular — Cutugno at the top of our lungs with some older men we had never seen before, arms around one another as though we had known each other forever. None of us had become children again. We had become something more precise: we had become free again.
“Do you remember?” I asked.
“I could never forget,” you answered.
That treehouse protected us. Not from winds, not from storms — those always come, whatever height you are at. It protected us from the real monsters: the ones outside, the ones wearing respectable faces and speaking the language of judgment. They couldn't get in there. In there, there was only what matters: presence, trust, the untidy beauty of real friendship.
And then the monster with the most brutal name of all arrived.
It came from outside too. From that outside we thought we had learned to keep at a distance. But some monsters don't ask permission to enter.
I won't tell you that I am always happy, that I found a cure for anxiety or learned how to manage anger. I would be lying, and you would know it.
What I understood — and I owe it to you — is that all of that is bullshit. That there is no definitive tactic for dealing with torment. That anxiety and anger are not enemies to defeat: they are parts of me that show me where to look, what I have not yet resolved, who I have not yet become. And that despite all of this — despite the abysses — it is possible to be at peace. Not always happy. At peace, yes.
I am a Cancer, after all. A water sign, a sign of protection, a sign of someone who carries everything inside before letting it out. Cancer is also the name of the disease that took you — and I have never found that coincidence neutral. As though fate had decided to place, inside a single word, everything that frightens us most and everything that generates the most care.
You were a Leo. And you did exactly what lions do: you looked danger in the eye until the end, lucidly, without looking for shortcuts. You refused anything that would have dulled your awareness, choosing instead to remain present — completely present — until the last moment. I don't know whether that is courage or something subtler. I know it was the clearest demonstration I have ever seen of how adversity should — the conditional matters — be faced: by staying. By fighting for what we say we love. By not running away.
That is what our group was made of. And I promise you it will remain that way.
I find parts of you in those who are still here — in a look, in a way of being present, in certain silences that speak exactly the way you did. I don't want to believe it is coincidence, partly because I don't believe in coincidences. It means you planted well. That the work you did on yourself and on other people took root. That, in a sense that goes beyond biology and perhaps beyond reason, you made it.
I am grateful, Mike. Selfishly, profoundly grateful.
And I am hopeful — and this may be the strangest gift you left me — because if it is true, and it is true, that the observer determines reality, then someone arranges the encounters. Someone decides which fires are seen and which paths lead where they are meant to lead. It is up to us to understand their meaning, without ever stopping walking.
I hope that one day this observer will let me meet you again.
I would like to stroke your blond mane once more, Lion.
Bye, Mike.