This is a collection of stories, a collection of memories that I have of my Father. I want to understand my perception of my Father and how that mediates our relationship. I have dug out these moments and begun to reformulate them in light of this goal. My aim is not to portray my father in a distinctly negative way but rather to write and bring back these fleeting moments, use them as an emotional backbone with which to make sense of various events in my life and the role my Father played in them. I begin with an extract of my coming out experience.

It has been brought to my attention by friends and the like that if I am to speak about my Father I must naturally speak about: my coming out experience. I came out to my parents (and subsequently my sister) at the tender age of 15. What does one know when they are 15 years old? I knew that I know more than everyone else. I knew nothing, only empty corridors, a large backpack and the way the light bends past the trees at 7 am. I also knew that I was an ‘other’. Part of something that was only spoken about in crude jokes, part of something that was undesirable, part of something that was unrepresented. I despaired over my condition, I treated it like a terminal disease. This terminal disease had the appeal of being internal and I tried my best to mold myself into the standard.

I thought I would never be loved, and I thought I would never be able to love anyone. I was also oddly obsessed with covering my tracks, certain that my friends knew I was hiding the boulder on my back. I would make up love stories and pretend I had a crush on a boy when really, I didn’t want to be with him I wanted to be him. The crush was always the most desirable boy, whoever had been picked by the Straight Girl Alliance. The criteria to become the eligible bachelor were surprisingly low but I refrained from telling my friends they could do better. He had to smell decent, have read at least one book that year, know how to flirt and not let the terrible curse of a haircut bring his status down. So many had come before him, tricking us until they came back from the hairdressers only to find that his status had fallen, and it was his best friend who had reclaimed the throne.

One thing I have not mentioned about the life of a 15-year-old is the way you feel and how you feel it. Oh my god, I felt at the bottom of the pit, I felt the totality of despair in it’s dark piercing beauty, I felt how it wrapped me up in its cat body and soothed me into oblivion. And the next day I would be joyful. Looking at the people that surround me and think ‘this is my life’, run through streets holding hands; the lamp post turning on being the only indicator of time, I have never been as drunk with happiness than when I was 15 and feeling hopeful with my friends. Remembering the way people looked at us with fear and wonder because we were as unpredictable as a pack of thieves who have just stolen the most valuable diamond there is and ever was on this small planet. There was nothing left for us to do.

All of this to say, that 15 is a peculiar age to come out. It happened in a rather sudden way and was not planned. It was an emotional outburst, an outpouring of my liver and heart and lungs and stomach. I wanted to show my father that it was all infected and I felt that if I held on to the despair my organs would inflate like little balloons and leave my body through my mouth. I did not want to choke on my lungs, but I had been doing so for the past year. The banality of my coming out numbed me for a couple days.

I wish the reasons that propelled me to ‘come out’ were dramatic or at least brave. But they weren’t. It happened because of a party. There was a party on Friday night and the details of that party are lost on me. Everyone I knew was going, even the friends who I had created a solidarity group with to vent about the oppressive nature of our ‘strict’ parents. Even the allies were going. My father was driving me to my swimming class. It was a Sunday evening and I decided to ask him if I could go. He said no, objected to it for some reason about not wanting to pick me up or it being too late for me to go back with the metro.

“Besides” he said, “We’ll go to the pizzeria and then you can pick the movie we watch.” I have always admired my father for being an intelligent and seemingly diplomatic man, but his negotiation skills were absolutely terrible. The 15-year-old rage trembled. I explained to him that there was a way out of this conundrum and my father showed his true colours: “No.” He said. A simple and eloquent no. It was not said with calmness it was said sternly the same way my grandmother says it when she finds me as I have discovered the hidden stash of chocolate Easter eggs and am engorging my face with sugar. I don’t think it was a conscious decision to say it or at least I hope not, all I really remember before the words came out was that I wanted to appeal to his humanity as my liver tried to make its way out of my body.

“I want to go because I am very sad these days, I just spend my time in my room being sad because I am gay.”

I still cringe to this day. Note that this sentence was said in English and is the only non-Italian form of communication during this conversation. The repetition of the word ‘sad’, the elusiveness of ‘spend my time in my room’ and leveraging my sexuality as a way to go to a party. Even the Straight Girl Alliance would say ‘that’s fucked up’. This was a poorly constructed sentence from the girl who loves words so much.  My father was silent. The timing of this could not have been more disastrous. He was pulling into the driveway of the sports centre. I often imagined what he said to himself afterwards as he drove back home, I like to imagine he thought ‘I should have told her she could have ice cream on top of picking the movie.’ He regained his posture as my words had made him crouch around the steering wheel, ‘who’s moulding himself now?’ I thought. We exchanged some banal sentences along the lines of ‘we will speak about this later’ and ‘good bye’.

I have never swum so quickly and with so much trashing in my entire life. I was hitting the water with my fists repeatedly, waiting with anxiousness for the big clock to strike 8 and the class to be over. As I left the sports center I felt no thoughts in my head, my fear had consumed me to the point of peaceful Buddha style calmness. My Mother was in the car. I opened the door and mustered the most nonchalant “Salut” and sat down. My Mother chatted with me about some documentary she had just seen. I waited for the moment, but it never came. I arrived in my sad little room and understood that my Father had not told my Mother yet. In fact, I didn’t see him that night he was in his room the entire time. Friday came, I did not go to the party and stayed in my room reading. And then, my sister left the house to go see a friend. As the door closed my Mother called for me to come down to the living room, I heard a smile in her voice I think she was nervous.