Mold

Home sweet home, where to return after a day of troubles and messes, drag oneself up endless flights of stairs, arrive with satisfaction at the right floor, put the door behind one's back and try unsuccessfully to shut out the cold that also passes under the hood and through the walls, turn off the background noise where the screams that have kept you sweetly company throughout the day go in a loop. Turn down the volume, take a deep breath, be about to politely remove the headphones, but out of a natural survival instinct turn the music up to the max.

Throwing the backpack somewhere, looking for a peaceful corner and not finding it, wondering why inside is the same as outside, noise that doesn't go out and cold that continues to threaten the heart, not even having the door of your room to slam making shaking the house because there isn't a space of your own where you can lock yourself up with your ghosts and play to make them disappear, build armor to defend yourself from monsters, experiment on your body to invent a new you.

Lock yourself in the bathroom, stare at your face in a mirror and wonder what you did wrong to deserve all of this. Mattresses to be pulled up during the day and down at night to be able to fit all in, camped one on top of the other in some way. Drafts in the window through which the frost passes, mold stains that fill the wall instead of the photos of the best memories that you don't know where to look anymore. You should study but there isn't a corner of the table where you can place a book, your head is already full of bad thoughts, there isn't even a small space where you can put things, you're on a tightrope from which you could fall at any moment , present too sad to imagine a future.

The night passes between a cough and a sneeze, phlegm in the throat and a cold that doesn't go away, the flu that is transmitted from little brother to little sister and from little sister back to little brother. Keep a very white paper handkerchief in your pocket and wipe your nose with the sleeve of your favorite shirt, the one you never want to change and keep even for sleeping, struggling just to breathe. All together necessarily in overcrowded and undersized houses, children and young people who grow up in low-income single-parent families, where no one earns anything, first the basic income and now the emergency income, knowing by heart an invented story to tell if they ask you what work do your folks do.

Someone has to contend for love and space even with animals, because where there isn't a crumb of affection, you still look for it in some other way, better the paw of a dog than the hand of a villain. There is no intimacy and there is no protection. The heart bursts with things to keep inside, full of secrets you can't tell anyone, out of shame and out of pride, out of a sense of loyalty that binds you inextricably to the same blood you still depend on for a living and will belong to. forever, because mom's tummy is the only place where you feel you've really been safe.

Then you end up hating and loving at the same time the musty smell and that room where everyone does everything, always, together by force day and night. Without them, you wouldn't exist, you think you are invincible neighbors and a moment later you just want to run away as far as possible. You feel the mold forming on top of your skin as well and you get anxious. It's night but no one sleeps, you think about the different and equal misfortunes of your friends, you just want to cry but no one would even notice those tears anyway, you can just pretend that something different could happen, hope that somehow you and your friends will you will come out. Together.

Marco Grossetti
NP April 2023