A Recipe

Ingredients:

A good amount of anything you like

Some patience

A handful of nice people

Directions:

Blend every single bit of life in a cake.

(Re)build broken hearts

Carve some pumpkins for fun

Check if everybody’s fine

Chop the grief away

Close it in a safe place

Cover faces with cheer

Cut revenge out your life

Decorate your soul with affection

Divide moments with others

Drop a spoonful of sunshine everywhere

Fold your secrets and keep them somewhere safe

Follow yellow brick roads

Insert new people

Leave pain alone

Make friends

Melt joy into ice cream topping

Mix the sad and good times in a bowl

Open your mind up to new experiences

Pack everything together and travel

Paint the smiles you saw

Pour some laughter in

Prepare yourself for change

Push away what made you cry

Raise a glass to toast life

Reduce the tears

Reheat passion

Replace sorrow

Salt the sweets

Season your routine

Separate what is right from wrong

Spread love

Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon

Stuff your heart with tenderness

Surround yourself with good people

Taste different, new things

Tie yellow ribbons

Twist and shout

Warm some cookies until they almost melt.

Finally,

Wrap everything up with some gift paper and place it under the Christmas tree.

Thank you for the company

I’ve never met you. I mean, I have, but not truly in person. Moreover I know you have no idea of who I am.

I’ve never really talked to you, but I’ve heard your thoughts, I imagined what you were feeling, how would I act if I were you.  I, many times, disagreed with your decisions; found them stupid, because maybe I knew how everything was going to end up.

I may, at first sight, have fallen in love with you, because of how you looked – I know, superficial, I shouldn’t judge anyone based on looks. Or because of something you said, some song you sang, an act you acted. I somehow connected to you, or felt I was your lost twin, or lost soulmate, or maybe because we are almost the same. We agree about the same things, because we think the same things, and, as time went by, I thought we would be inseparable.

However, depending on who you are, I may also have misjudged you in the very beginning, because you didn’t look pretty, or you didn’t have a British accent, or because I just thought you weren’t at all good, since I couldn’t see the whole you. Furthermore I may have then wished you would be dead. Sorry for that.

I mean, I spent days talking about you to my friends, my family, even to unknown people. I didn’t sleep, just so I could see you. I sometimes waited almost two years to meet you again. One year. Six months.

Then, we met weekly. Or daily, when I could literally see you anywhere.

However you, out of nowhere, suddenly disappeared from my life. It wasn’t me, it was you. You just simply decided you should move far away from here and live happily ever after. Or you killed yourself. Or you were unfairly killed. Or you just simply asked someone to tell me you were gone. How could you abandon me so easily?

How could you, after months, years, leave me with nothing, but the sweet memories we had together? How could you?

I’ve always wished you well, looked up to you.  Now I won’t see you ever again and it breaks my heart, because you made me cry and laugh like nobody else did.

So I’d like to thank you, for all the good moments, when you made me stop in time, or travel through history and for all the times you cheered me up.

For the reason that there are just a few pages left for the book to end or because the season finale is tomorrow.

Thank you Emma Woodhouse, for all your matchmaking, your scheming, all your erroneous thoughts, which I could so clearly understand when you couldn’t.

Thank you Matthew Crawley and Lady Sybil for your sweetness, changing nobility’s habits and for making me immerse in your gorgeous blue eyes. I thank you Dowager, for your irony towards everything. Thank you Mary, for making me realize I’m exactly like you, but in the same time so different.

Thank you Pi,  for all your observations about boats and stuff.

At last, I’d like to thank you, beloved character, who is reading this and wondering why your name isn’t here. The thing is, I love you just as much as the ones who were previously quoted, as well as the ones who weren’t. However, the problem is, this small farewell would turn into a bible of goodbyes, which would lead me terribly to an infinite sea of tears.

So thank you, characters of all types, shows and chapters. Thank you for all the company you keep, and the space you’ll always have in my heart.

Lost Generation

Broken by History

She crossed the border illegally and went from princess to worker in a few days. She saw her house burn and her dolls turn into ashes. She lost a father because of jealousy, and went to another place to run away from two powerful uncles.

He lost his family in a shipwreck, and sailed through the seven seas from India to Canada. Before that, however, the Indian economy wasn’t doing well, and obliged them to sell their zoo.

She left a beloved home, a beloved country, a beloved past memory to run from the Nazis, because in their mentality, the way she prayed wasn’t the right one. So she had to move to LA as fast as she could, even though it meant to leave her ill father and a dazzling Gustave Klimt’s portrait in Vienna.

He saw in buzzling New York a new life he would never know in a small village in cold Russia. And the children of his cousins saw, in a balloon, a possibility to flee from Eastern Germany.

She spent months in the middle of nowhere, trying to get anywhere, because China didn’t really seem like a brilliant future for a grandmother, a mother and two little girls.

He never made it to Europe, but his body did, floating in the Mediterranean. He broke millions of people’s hearts. The Earth cried blood and salty tears, as it never cried before, for the boy who lived a little, and moved lots of cold individual souls.

Pieces of History’s infinite puzzle. Missing pieces, molded in a way they would never fit in their original place ever again. The edges would never fit, and all of them would be forever outsiders, lost between Mexico and the US, New Delhi and Montreal, Austria and California, Minsk and the big apple, Hong Kong and Sidney, Syria and the EU. Lost all over the world.

Children's fates, brutally taken away.

The forces of destiny have never been so cruel.

Teenage whims

"All young people would have their little whims"

- Mrs. Weston, “Emma”, Jane Austen, 1815.

To get a whole pizza to celebrate, and Nutella in times of sorrow;

Never wait for the cookies to be ready, eat the fresh dough;

Be as impatient as a child; ambitious as an adult.

Selfish and unselfish

To break things and legs

Live in drama and comedy

Tears and laughter

Skip gym to watch Netflix,

Skip classes to fall in love or study before tests.

Immersed in boredom, but always busy to stop for a while.

To look forward to a party, and spend it in a corner, with a phone in hand;

Criticize society and do nothing to change it;

To see everything in black and white and ignore what’s gray.

Match summer with ice cream;

Winter with Starbucks;

And forget about salad.

To be blind and have eyes opened;

To shock and be shocked,

Laugh continually.

To complain about everything and generalize;

Find excuses all the time;

Love more than it is possible, and hate intensely.

Have hope when nobody has faith.

See magic in little acts.

To exaggerate and daydream.

To see what’s good in people and quickly believe them;

Be naïve and spontaneous.

To let things go and hold on to them

To be and not to be

To shout at the sea, and cry when no one’s looking,

To judge and be judged,

And face men, women and children as equals.

To understand diversity and embrace it.

To be, at the same time, lost and found in reality.

Bucket lists

Scent of a Woman

Wearing a black hat and a long coat, her eyes sparkled like Christmas lights.

In winter she smelled like fire. It was a mixture of new books, cinnamon, orange, raw writing and sunflowers that made everyone smile at her. She contrasted with the white landscape:  she never smelled like snow.

Sitting on a bench, the figure ignored the sights which announced that spring was here: flowers and birds weren’t interesting at all. The crux of the matter was the museum’s newest exhibition about Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. She then smelled like ice, satin and pears; an uncommon scent for an uncommon person, who refused to wear anything floral in April.

In July, she was the exact opposite of summer breezes: she enjoyed high temperatures with freezing air conditioning, which spread her warm scent in the air. Basil, lilies and burgundy lipstick; dark stripes and round sunglasses, paired with gladiator sandals, because she was more dramatic than classic tragedy.

Autumn, then, came as a surprise. She wore white almost every day, as a protest against “season’s color pallet”. NYFW wasn’t the only fashion dictator there was. She competed with it every day, with her raspberry and lemons smell. A touch of washed hair, smoothie and mascara, and she was ready to fight the world.

Her great-grandmother used to say “Don’t forget to smell the world”.  That was now her mantra, her life-decisions guide, which she religiously repeated every day, while brushing her teeth.

Her life goal was to show everyone that Carolina Herrera was too démodé.