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A thousand times the mysteries unfold like galaxies in my head.

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My heart is like a big, fat, ripe pomegranate. Juicy, yet stale pieces of it fall off with every beat and every impulse of every common day, until nothing but a clean meaningless white crust of impressions remains. It’s an outward silence twisted inside into...

Yesterday it was my birthday, so I took a short pause from the usual ludic and literary discourse to simply celebrate myself with some all-you-can-eat sushi. That was well deserved and perfect for the occasion. But enough about me and my culinary journeys. Now I am back, and ready to fall into the deep meditation of what growing up, or rather growing down, means.

I was told that in order to truly live your life, you have to do something you fear each day. Writing is, for most, not really a big deal. It's just like leaving a post-it note on the door of the fridge -a comfortable and immediate way to communicate something to someone in the near future. A means to trick time, if not necessarily for your own selfish sake. But I fear it.

For many years as a kid, I was upset with God. It was something in the way the priest gripped my cheeks each time he would come to bless our home after Christmas or Easter. It was something in the smell of incense that choked my throat when I entered the church. And, although my grandmother tried to build a halo of legends around God with whispered bed-time stories, the continuous gossip of old ladies in the church halls made my skin crawl. I was the constant target of this blabber, as I didn’t use to cover my head and as my 8-year old clothes were ridiculously regarded as too voluptuous. But most of all, I was upset with God because of the war in Yugoslavia. I used to spend several hours looking outside the window at night and imagining fires and violence, until I would eventually fall asleep, tickled by a childish despair and by the smell of dry rags. It was hard for me to believe God had his ways. I blamed Him for indifference and sometimes even for inexistence.

On my first trip to Italy, I wanted to greet Venice as a holy place. I somehow saw myself as a profane being, ready to plunge into the secrets of a city I could not understand, whose name only reminded me of an overwhelming culture and Renaissance busts. The floating city of Venice was, in my imagination, the same with the ancient city of Atlantis and I expected to see Venice too sink under the seas the very moment I would get to its lands. At the same time, my Venice was full of Romeos and Juliets cuddling all throughout the city, in the gondolas and on every narrow bridge. I was quite sure their tears of joy actually added up to the water that would eventually sink the city. That is why, when I got the chance to approach Venice, I was grateful to the fact that I managed to see it before it totally disappeared.

As a very determined video game player  I have many times wondered if I’m not crossing the border between real and unreal too often at some point. What I mean is, am I trying to compensate for a sort of insufficient reality? Am I better off as a very voluptuous Lara Croft, or as a sensual assassin wreaking havoc in the Italian countryside? Or as an evil mastermind building cities and rushing against my opponent? Are video games my drugs? Giving me a sense I sometimes miss in my own life?