In Tuscany for a weekend, with dad

I have only now realized that going on a solo trip with my dad was one of the most meaningful things I could have done before leaving. I was concerned because me and him can sometimes be a bit distant, and I was worried about spending three full days with him. But, as it turned out, my preoccupations were nonsense. Much to my surprise, we spent almost the whole time talking. The conversations we had were flowing naturally, almost as if they had been waiting for the right moment to begin. It felt like someone finally opened a tap that had been previously spurring only a few drops of water, every once in a while.

We mostly talked about our lives. He now sees his almost in retrospection. He told me something that hit me. That at his age, you become aware that the core of life has passed, that the “main days” are gone, and that what is left is somehow only the leftover part. It’s a grim way to see it, but I sort of understand it, as even I have started to feel as if some of the best moments of my life have already occurred, and now belong only to the realm of memories. He told me he’d like to move to a quieter place. A big city is not pleasurable to grow old in. You’re constantly surrounded by life, and every moment you are reminded of what has been (maybe, of what could have been) and of what is left to come. He told me mom sees his desire to retire to a quieter life as a desire to retire from her.

I’ve seen their relationship under a new light. I used to wonder how they could have spent their life together without ever getting tired of each other. How this couple managed to stay magically together since high school. But dad mentioned some stuff that happened in the past, which they never talked about with me before. For example, he told me how, when he was 18, he broke up with my mom during summer, because he wanted to have fun with a girl that he met at the beach. Then, a few months later, he went back to my mom’s house with a bouquet of flowers, and she instantly forgave him. In general, it seems that it was my dad to fuck up most of the times. I recognize myself in this. He even confessed that he had a crush on one of his colleagues, and that he and mom almost broke up again because of it, shortly before I was conceived. I wonder how she managed to bring him back that time? Getting to know these “secrets”, these skeletons sealed in a wardrobe, as the saying goes, comfortingly portrays my parents under a somehow more human light. They are, after all, two humans who have both made their share of mistakes. Which exactly these mistakes were remains, of course, a matter only for them to judge upon.

In fact, when we have serious conversations, dad often ends up talking about his mistake. It doesn’t have to do with mom, but rather with his own troubled university experience. With the pressure to fulfil the high expectations of a distant yet idolised father, and with dad’s own self-destructive pride. That pride which, first masked as perseverance, kept him from switching to a less hard and possibly more fulfilling major. The same pride that, later on, when he had no other option than to drop out of uni, dissuaded him from signing up to extra-academic courses, where he would have had the opportunity to still learn about subjects that fascinated him, only from a more practical standpoint, as opposed to the theoretical one that usually dominates within the glass walls of academia. Rejecting that sense of pride would have done him a lot of good, as it would have eventually made his career - and his life -  a bit better. The thought fills him with regret. I can sense it, as his eyes move nervously, trying to grasp an happy ending within his own story. “In the end, I don’t feel like I’ve lived a useless life.” - he states - “But I’ve certainly missed the opportunity to make my last working years a bit less bleak”. His eyes look defeated.

“After the last battle, has every man met his defeat, only to find in himself his lifelong enemy?”.

Sporadically throughout my early adulthood, it touched me to hear him admit that, since I was born, he had tried to save me from committing his same mistakes. An instinctive act of protection, which only now I can recognize as a silent, and yet extraordinarily powerful declaration of love.