Tuesday, December 31 (yes, it's December 31, 2024, New Year's Eve), I'm at my home in Mogliano completely alone, my family of origin, or rather the remaining survivors, are in Chioggia busy with their lives.
Distant, because if you don't have a car, even Chioggia is distant.
Even my children are distant, taken by their mother who takes advantage of my situation to strengthen her relationship with them at the expense of mine, and so she takes them up to the mountains (In reality, she did very well, also because I wouldn't have been able to give them anything since I'm dirt poor).
But there is even something worse than being alone on New Year's Eve like a dog, actually much worse than a dog, having no money or any available economic resources, being forced to eat just a plate of spaghetti or some rice, moreover, gifted by some kind soul.
YES, there is something even worse.
Yes, because today the most intense and engaging love story of my life ends! The story with a wonderful and unsettling person, whom I will henceforth call Miriam, from the movie “The Hunger”.
This post and then the book that will follow, because I want to write a book about it, will be called (My) Miriam Wakes Up at Noon, and we will see in detail for what analogies, but I immediately specify that it is because “Noon” is the characteristic time when my beloved wakes up... if and when things have gone well for her.
I want to talk about this person not so much and not only for my personal romantic disappointment. But because Miriam is somehow the symbol, the archetype of a way of living, of an environment and the recurring situations that occur there, I speak of a toxic environment, a small (?) world populated by drug addicts, by pushers or dealers of various sizes, with a backdrop of prostitutes (by trade or “occasional” to get doses), thieves, thugs, fraudsters, robbers, burglars, housebreakers, criminals of various kinds and, last but not least, corrupt police officers and carabinieri.
In short, all the people revolving around what is the drug trafficking in Italy and in the world, whether it's the black ghettos in America in the '80s or today's Sicily, a trafficking in which the gold palm of danger and social damage caused is due to a specific drug: crack, smokable cocaine, which has long surpassed heroin, and claims victims especially among young people, but not only.
The person I will talk about in this post is the archetype, and I do not mean only the archetype of a “worthless junkie”, I use the words with which she herself wanted to define herself despite my protests, but of all those that are the psychological, social, cultural, and human characteristics of a person who has always lived in a highly toxic environment, a “small world” where violence and deceit are the only methods to survive and the only certain rule, where if you are a beautiful woman, harassment is as daily as and attempted rape occurs monthly... on average.
So my romantic misadventure, my pain, my regret for something wonderful that ended badly is not the point I want to talk about, because it is obviously not of “general” interest.
No, the fact is that the reason for my (our) vicissitudes is closely linked to the structural characteristics of the environment in which she and I live, in which I wanted to insert myself for my recent and reckless vocation of assisting people.
In this series of posts, I do not want to dwell on why I came into contact with this environment, nor on the reasons and circumstances for which I met the person I now love. Not only would it be too long, but it would distract attention towards other themes that I intend to detail in another series of other posts and in other books.
Through the story of my personal romantic disappointment, I intend to explain some typical characteristics of this environment, which I sometimes call the “dark world”, because I think it is important for someone to do so.
The environment I describe is the criminal and local one of Veneto simply because I live here, and therefore I have had the opportunity to know directly various people involved, the dynamics, the events that have occurred, I have many anecdotes to tell, which will end up in the posts of my blog first and in my books later.
But it is anything but a local issue.
With some slight differences, these dynamics, those same characteristics of the people involved, of the emerging characters, are something that repeats everywhere, that has a recognizable, codifiable “pattern”, and that is increasingly pervasive and unsettling.
And it is not dissimilar from the situations I have seen with my own eyes in other countries nor from the dynamics I have seen described in newspaper articles and books concerning distant countries.
Happy Reading!... and please: HOLD ON TIGHT!,,..or..as we use to sai in this region “DURI AI BANCHI!”