Chapter Text
You wake up late on a Sunday and it takes a while for you to trudge through your morning rituals and head into the common room.
It’s a rare occasion so many of your squadmates are in today. You do a quick headcount and find that only Formaggio and Ghiaccio are absent. The rest are gathered around the tv, crammed into the room and on the couches. Risotto looms in the doorway, half watching tv, half watching everyone else.
You sidestep him to squeeze into the kitchenette for your daily cup of coffee.
“What are you watching?” You approach the couch with your cup, careful to not sound too interested.
Something about Illuso gives off the sense of cool indifference, something you coveted intensely. He doesn’t respond, but Pesci does.
“The Postman. Have you heard of it?” Pesci is helpful, maybe because he’s no longer the newest. Though, you think, you’ve probably been in the business longer, but it’s not like you can remember anything about your life before a few months ago. Still, it’s nice that he's nice when he doesn’t need to be.
You shake your head, not so fond of films where a good chunk of it is silence. You watch quietly anyway.
“It’s good,” Illuso insists. “It’s Massimo Troisi. He died right after they finished filming.” His eyes stay on the screen and he doesn’t move to make room for you on the couch, so you make yourself comfortable on the armrest.
Quickly you piece together the plot: a prickly but kind poet moves to an island in exile, befriends a local fisherman’s son, and teaches him poetry so that he can win over a women that works at an inn. Quaint.
On the small tv, a man writes down poetry, his face superimposed on shots of the woman wading on a beach. His voice is thin and reedy.
“Naked,” Massimo’s character recites, “you are simple as one of your hands - smooth, terrestrial, small, round, transparent.” The woman gazes longingly at the camera, her eyes large and dark.
It’s as if all the lights in your head go out when he speaks. You barely hear the rest of it but you’d think you know it by heart:
You have moonlines, apple pathways, he will say next. Naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.
Naked, you are blue as the night in Cuba;
You have vines and stars in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.
How could you know these words when you have just heard them for the first time? They come with a strange thought: your mind screaming, he’s gone! He’s gone! But who? It was like someone punched through your gut with a switchblade.
“Hey, are you crying?”
You reach up and touch your cheek. Sure enough, there are tears sliding down your face. Big, fat ones, too globulous for the occasion, for when the woman’s concerned auntie snatches the poem from her and her indignant face fills up the whole screen. It’s comical. What’s even funnier is that your face is calm, placid like a lake that has iced over. And it’s not like you are incapable of being sad - you’ve bawled before, back when you first woke up and didn’t even know your own name. Back then your face contorted with emotions, but now...
“Huh, yeah, I guess so,” you mumble as you swipe at your face, “but I don’t know why.”
It isn’t a lie - you don’t feel particularly sad or moved, especially not by what was happening on screen (the concerned auntie is now hilariously losing it in front of a apathetic priest, clutching her metaphorical pearls and demanding to know what the poem is about). But the tears don’t stop, in fact more and more slide down your face, leaving a new wet trail for each one you try to wipe away with your hand.
“What? You’re crying? I know this is a sad movie, my dear, but I don’t know if it warrants any tears.” Melone isn’t so interested in his laptop anymore and snaps it shut. There’s a half-cat half-moon smile on his face and you’re thankful Fromaggio isn’t here to make the teasing worse.
A few stray tears clinging to lashes or red, puffy eyes would be ok for a movie like this, but not if you’re looking like you’ve heard the worst news of your life.
Like you’re yearning for someone who’s gone forever, your mind finishes for you.
Each person in the room is staring at you now. Prosciutto especially, he stares at you hard and long as he pulls a pale yellow handkerchief from his breast pocket and hands it to you wordlessly.
You pat your face with it, your hot tears soaking through the cloth quickly and thoroughly.
The film marked a turning point in your life. Sometimes you find yourself standing in front of cafes longingly, or spacing out when you hear seagulls crying meow, meow. You count things to make sure there are more or fewer than four, for no reason - you don’t know why.