There will always be that strange feeling—the fear of not belonging, the sense that everything I do is so tiny, so fragile and transient that nothing will remain. That maybe all of it is fiction, and one day I’ll wake up and realize this exhaustion inside me, this fear and uncertainty, were never real—just the product of my imagination.
I will wake up in my little room on the fifth floor of a concrete building, stained by rain and time, its renovation work postponed for years, in the perfect Italian way. Every time I looked at it from afar, my stomach sank. It was ugly, quiet, filled with bent antennas and peeling paint—but it was home. Whenever I feared I didn’t belong anywhere, I thought of that narrow balcony, the rusty railings, the laundry that swayed without grace. It reminded me that somewhere, somehow, a part of me existed. My fifth floor. My nothing. My everything.
On the façade, just above the patches of dampness, ran thin lines, like veins in the wall. As a child, I believed they outlined the apartments inside—as if every family had its own precise border, as if love had a floor plan. My room was framed by those lines: I could trace them in the summer light, beside the stickers on the window and the white bars my mother had put up so I wouldn’t lean out too far.
I remember the gate creaking, the red elevator so small my brother and I had to wedge ourselves inside with our schoolbags and giggle softly so it wouldn’t jam. I remember the car window and my childhood habit of pointing at everything red—my favorite color—as if each red thing somehow belonged to me.
But the hardest and sweetest thing to remember is my little room: a space overflowing with books tumbling onto each other, stuffed animals curled like sleepers, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that only came alive at night and kept me company. My electric piano sat balanced on the desk—there was no room for anything else. Photos of happy days—always past, never present—stared back from the wall.
There was a small bedside table with a prayer book, a Lego collection built winter after winter, medals from odd competitions, ribbons, pictures of horses I could never afford. Dreams crammed into drawers among colorful pens and notes—scribbles meant to keep me alive. Behind my bed hung a map of Greek mythology, my companion in imaginary travels. Each night I stared at its golden gods and heroes and whispered to myself that one day I would find my place too, somewhere out there.
My room smelled like me. The pillowcases were soft, and in the afternoons the light fell in grid-like slants across the wooden floorboards. I danced invisible waltzes in my mother’s high heels, jumped like an athlete, chalked equations on furniture, and imagined Saturn’s rings, the double helix of DNA, the symmetry of geometry. The cream-blue color of the walls soothed me, even when I didn’t understand anything about myself.
But that same room has also known the dark—the silence, the fears, the sleepless nights, the tears.
Tears falling onto the desk while a motorbike roared down the street outside and car horns echoed between cracked buildings. Cries muffled into the pillow so no one would wake, because screaming never changed anything. Endless nights in front of a glowing screen, eyes burning, head heavy, pushing myself to finish applications that felt larger than I was. The clacking of the keyboard became my heartbeat. Each click carried fear, longing, fatigue. No one believed in me or in my plans, and the silence of those I loved weighed more than a thousand refusals.
I cried over broken loves and trampled friendships, over words said wrong and words never said. I cried because no one talked to me at school, because during recess, even my breathing felt too loud, out of place. I cried for loneliness, for an adolescence that never began, and for an adulthood that arrived too soon—heavy, ill-fitting, like a coat that wasn’t mine.