The things that have kept me alive.
April 2010 - January 2011
Influenced by "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery.
1.
The feeling I hate the most is that kind of feeling when you're kind of lethargic and melancholy, like waking up from a nice long nap in the middle of a summer Sunday afternoon and the rain starts tapping at your window like it's looking for a place to sleep, and everything is a slate grey and your bed is warm and every song you listen to makes you want to simultaneously throw up and smile because you just can't keep your eyes open.
I once tried to tell Kyouya about this both magnificent and terrible condition, and all he said to me was, "I have a head-splitting migraine. Shut up."
"How does it feel?" I said.
"Like I'm on LSD," he snapped from the hospital bed, and I was about to tell him that people shouldn't tell other people that they feel like they're on LSD if they've never been on LSD in the first place because only God knows about all my very clever drug endeavors, but wisely kept my mouth shut for the rest of the hospital visit. I decided that I would only start worrying if he started hallucinating, which was a bad thing, LSD-induced or not.
Looking at the bump in the once-crisp sheets from my spot in the doorway, I decided Kyouya in a good mood was a lot like that glum feeling. Kyouya in a bad mood—now, that's something I never want to encounter for the rest of my life.
2.
For a polynomial to be an actual polynomial, it has to have whole numbers and real coefficients. When I was younger, I looked at mathematics with an air of good-natured tolerance, if not indifference, but as the years go by, it became something like an escapist act.
My favourite thing about math is that no matter how much you've done it, you can always mess up. True—coming from me, who's never down in the dumps, this kind of thinking is really down in the dumps. Just because you've known someone for years doesn't mean that you can read their mind. It's people who are like that—people who are wild and out of control—that wreck your lives.
But, in a way, it's kind of funny that I should be the one to say that. For most of my life, all of the people who were ever close to me were like that: my father, who I won't talk about, and Squalo, who is too loud, and Reborn, who is too difficult to understand ninety percent of the time, and Kyouya, who is worse than everyone combined for a whole different matter.
However, I don't claim to be any different. Sure I may have déjà vu and sometimes my men are panicky when I am alone, but I am the boss around here and everyone knows it. Therefore, I have authority. I have the right to be out of control.
Kyouya claims to have authority, too, but his definition of the word is totally different from mine. Authority is a good, strong leader, which sometimes I am not but I always try to be. Kyouya is like the reincarnation of Stalin or something—you know, those communist leaders who claim that their goal is to restore their country to its former glory but are secretly itching to try their hand at world domination. Sometimes people are good at world domination—or, are good at getting it started—but what they fail to grasp is that the world is a pretty big place. You think having 5000 men is easy? Most definitely not. So-and-so and so-and-so really don't get along and so-and-so is allergic to strawberries so God be with him if there are strawberries on the table and so-and-so is terrified of horses. If I had the option to chose between having 5000 men or 5 billion men, or however many people in the world there are nowadays—I am pretty sure that it was 5 billion when I was growing up, but I could be wrong—I am nearly one-hundred percent sure that I would chose the former.
So, really, world domination, or even having an entire city surrender to you in Kyouya's case, is not really advised. I suppose managing a town is a whole lot easier if you're going to do it totalitarian-style like Kyouya does because everyone is just terrified. But, then again, there is always going to be the anomaly—Reborn, for instance, because he's not afraid of anyone.
Polynomials: whole numbers and real coefficients. But even if you do read minds and keep friendships forever, fast-forward to the battlefield and you're totally unprepared. Either way, you're fucked.
3.
Sometimes it's hard to tell who knows less of one another: me or Kyouya. Of course I tried to tell him as much as I could about me during the first few months of knowing each other but whether he listened or not, I still can't tell. He's either extremely difficult or insanely easy to read and large fluctuations like that have always bothered me.
There are many things I don't understand about him. I guess he's just part of the heap of people and ideas and innovations that I could never ever wrap my mind around, like erasable crayons, for one—that's the charm in kindergarten first grade second grade third grade drawings; they are completely messy, but that's the whole point. When I was sick with the flu or something that one time maybe two years ago, I watched a video on how education was killing creativity. I had thought cynically, "What, so being hoboes is going to make us smarter or something? I didn't learn how to add and subtract and colour inside the lines from sitting idly in my room staring at the walls all day."
I suppose that where it all crashes and burns; the minute your teacher tells you that your artwork is not good enough because you coloured outside the lines.
Or maybe—this happened to me—it said to colour the toad dark brown, but Miss So-and-so told me that it was not acceptable because it looked black, but either I was creative enough to realize that it never told me which shade of dark brown or Miss So-and-so was going blind.
Anyways, the speaker of the video was Sir So-and-so, and surprisingly I could understand his English even after not using it after three years of not being in high school anymore. What exactly he said, I can't remember, but the most striking part of his talk was that there was a test conducted on children under a certain age and children around my age. You could say that twenty-year-olds aren't considered children in society, but you're always going to be someone's child. And when the results came in, only a meager percentage of children over whatever age the cut-off was were classified as today's standard of "genius" while the majority of younger children were.
This might have been the part in my life where I started viewing conformity as something that should you should be weary against. After all, look how smart we all were and then the intelligence plummeted like dropping a boulder from the sky. This is why I tried to be as open as possible with Kyouya, even though he didn't take me very seriously. He's just one gigantic tangent that I can't seem to get out of.
4.
"I should push you off this building," was the first thing Kyouya said to me after two years of not seeing me. But, as I was already used to this kind of violent greeting from a variety of people in my life, I didn't react.
"If you'd like, I can push you off, too," was my reply, to which Kyouya's mouth merely twitched and his eyes narrowed—that I had already predicted, but the good thing about knowing what is possible and what is impossible in the future is that you are usually calmer about many things, such as death threats and murder weapons. (Speaking of murder weapons, a few months after Tsuna returned from the future, he told me that Kyouya's weapons were handcuffs, which brings several negative connotations that I never want to see Kyouya doing in my life, please and thank you.)
"If we fall together, you'll fall first," he said slowly, taking his time like he had all the time in the world to make fun of me and stomp me into the ground, "and then I'll just land on you."
I opened my mouth and was about to say something about how unfair that was, but then I remembered the concept of free fall and how his reply made absolutely no sense to the scientist.
By no means do I claim to be a scientist myself, because even though I did study this subject extensively in high school, after years of never using a physics equation that had to do with gravity or refraction or anything at all, all the knowledge in my head just escapes like helium from a balloon. "If you push an apple and an elephant and me off this building all at the same time," I said, "we'd all hit the ground at the same time."
But, as Kyouya is Kyouya after all, he only raised a very delicate eyebrow at me and said, "You're a joke."
A joke!—absolutely, because it would kill him if he could not win against his old home tutor. As far as Kyouya is concerned with the world, life is not worth living if you don't knock everyone down and make them listen to you. Life is just one big war and you have to win or else the other guy will kill you. Kill you! With a spoon or fork or some chopsticks or something totally, completely brutal like that, and it will hurt much more than a gunshot because you are dying very slowly instead of instantly. Well, if that's not sad, I don't know what is.
5.
Most of us, the lucky ones I mean, live our lives without much thought for the future. Of course, we all plan out long-term goals, and if we're even luckier, we get them done and start again, with different long-term goals. For example, if my long-term goal was to get into the college I wanted to go to and got in, the next one would be to find a nice girl, or something. And if that was all ready to go, the next one would be to settle down with that nice girl and start a family. And the next one would be to make sure I could provide for my family and do my part to make sure their goals get completed, too.
As you can see, most of those goals all come from one goal, and as it matures, it's still the same basic principle. But what are you going to do if your original goal never gets completed? Instead of a step function, it becomes a piece-wise function instead. You start anew.
Some of us can read a history textbook and realize that every once in a while, the person you're reading about is around the same age as you. And then you wonder what they were like, what kinds of things they loved, did they like the same things that you like? What if they were sent into the future and happened to be your classmate? Would you be best friends or bitter rivals? If the things that had happened to them suddenly happened to you, would you be able to do the same?
And then there is the exception, the ones that you are totally apathetic about. And if you think about it hard enough, life is just one big exception.
If you were a pessimist, then there is no such thing as meritocracy. It doesn't exist! Of course, the idea of it is charming and fair, but then again, the human race is full of contradictions. I know someone full of contradictions and who lives in Japan, and he is lovely and shrewd and malicious all at the same time. That is because sometimes he is asleep and sometimes he is in the presence of people that he respects—which is a very modest amount—and others he is too busy attacking people with his peculiar weapons that he forgets all about manners. Kyouya is one of those people who I wish I could feel nothing for, a total exception, but as it turns out, there is something under those imperfections that make me want to understand—to piece together the model with no manual until I finally have something that works.
6.
The thing about kindergarten and the primary school are the years where you learn the majority of things you should know to get by in life. I suppose that Kyouya never went to school before seventh grade, because seventh grade is where things start to get nasty, and he's been nasty from the very start.
When I was younger, maybe eight or nine, I begged my father to let me play the cello. There was no real reason why I wanted to or why he had let me, because eight and nine is when you are brainwashed to whatever is on TV. You want this and that, please, Daddy, please, let me get what I want. Romario (this was when he was quite young) had unceremoniously flopped onto the living room sofa after a long, tiring day spent negotiating with a rival family and flipped onto a music programme, one of those fancy ones with reporters and star players and everything. This was before my rugby phase—you laugh, I know you do; Dino, how in the world did someone as clumsy as you ever play rugby?—which was even before my football phase, which is something that I am still growing out of as we speak.
And—all I could think was, "What beautiful music!" Around this time I submersed myself into the world of music, as far as a first-grader could before he hit rock bottom. But of course! Private lessons only go so far. I joined the school orchestra and that was where I learned that it was not about you; the most important thing is teamwork, and if you only focus on yourself and don't listen to what's being played around you, you mess up.
I can't remember when my interest started to dwindle, but even today, every time I ever see a thesaurus I cross out the words for "art" and "music." There is no synonym for "art" and "music." Art is something wonderful that you can't even begin to bring yourself to explain to anyone. Art is something deep, deep inside, like a caged bird that desperately wants to fly. Art is sitting and waiting and counting the beats until you are supposed to take your bow and slowly start your vibrato and listening for the signal. Where's the signal? What does it sound like? Sometimes it is not always marked on your score.
Sometimes you have to open up all your senses and really feel it. There is no instructional guide for art. Sometimes, like in mathematics, you mess up.
7.
Speaking of mess-ups, I am always surprised when people say they speak Latin fluently. You don't know the first thing about Latin. If you do, then I am more surprised. The first thing about Latin is that no one knows how to speak Latin.
You may be wondering: Dino, what is that supposed to mean? What that's supposed to mean is that whenever someone tells you they know how to correctly pronounce Latin words, they are lying. You can even pull a Reborn and kick them in the face, if you are feeling particularly vicious, which is probably what Kyouya feels ninety percent of the day. (Those two have a lot in common.) There are no native speakers of Latin, so if you go up on some Latin dictionary online and search up "pronunciation," they are lying to you. So who knows if it's pu-e-lla or pwe-lla? Definitely not me.
8.
What is it that makes people happy? Sometimes it is winning, plain and simple. Like a military leader, you've taken over what you wanted to take over and are content with just having something to hold, like a ribbon or a bronze medal or a gold trophy or something both as small and as big as your lover's hand. Other times it is getting rid of something, like a fly or that B+ that ruined your grade or someone you used to love but realized that you fell apart a very long time ago.
Love stories are very popular; when I was younger that's all I ever thought about: who I'd fall in love with, what they were like, when that perfect timing would finally happen and all the magic talk about being in love would finally make sense. But, love is much more wonderful than that. Much more mysterious.
People always say that life is a candle, or life is not all flowers and rainbows, or that life is a waltz in four-four time with people tripping all over. What is that supposed to mean? There are a lot of things that I don't get about the human race, like why we are so intent on comparing life to strange things, or where do we have such intense hatred for certain things and love to death others, or where language and psychology and music and mathematics came from. Why is it that we are born with the inexorable desire to understand everything we see?
For a moment, let's talk about anesthetics. When I was younger and was abundant in cavities, the dentist had put anaesthetic in my mouth and for the rest of the day I kept biting my cheeks and the next morning I could feel the insides all tattered up. That's the dangerous part of not being able to feel anything; you become unafraid.
You are completely unafraid.
And I suppose you could say that that's why people fall in love. They can't feel until they find someone to feel all these things with, and then what happens? A disaster! Sometimes people are so caught up with this emotion that may or may not be love that they forget, and all the memories of what they were like before this person came along disappears and crumbles into dust in the vacuum of their mind. And when they are done loving, they sit on their couch with a TV remote absently in their hand and the dim murmuring of the TV in the background and they will think one thought: "Oh my God, it's over." You think this hasn't happened to me before? It has.
"It's over." What's over? The fact that your eyes were unseeing? Obviously. One day everything will become clear. Everything you've never understood will be clear.
5000 men or 5 billion? Whole numbers or fractions? Cello or rugby or football? Is it really over? Where has our love gone? How in the world will I ever figure you out?
All kinds of things.
9.
My favourite part of the Bible is the Song of Songs, for love is the closest thing to art that I will ever come to.
But, then again, who can say that it's really love? Truthfully, I don't love people; I bear with them and I understand them more than I can understand myself, but there is always an anomaly to everything in the world. There are many things I do not understand about Kyouya; the way so many things are black and white to him, the way he never stumbles, the way that sometimes he is so cryptic that I need to bend down and quiet my breathing and just watch his face for a flicker of an emotion.
Math tires me, and so does love, and so do those Sunday blues. Sometimes nothing inspires me, sometimes I am so inspired that it feels as if it is pouring out my bones. Sometimes I wake up and the only thing I want to do is play the cello that I haven't touched in years.
And I want to do all the math problems in the world and make x equals negative b over two a into the quadratic formula only about twenty-four times (for every year I have lived). And I want to make cake, even though I've never made cake in my whole entire life. And I want to throw away all my hatred and walk into the parts of Rome that are not the Vongola's and make friends with everyone. And I want to dance, even though my men never think it's a good idea, but I don't give a fuck. I want to dance with Kyouya and make fools out of ourselves because he's never waltzed and doesn't want to, anyway, and I only waltz all the time, by myself, in my room, humming a merry song I make up as I go along the steps. What a stupid thought.
Why is it that I never do the things that I want to do? Perhaps it's because I am too wary of the world. I am wary of the way Kyouya bites and snaps and growls. I am wary of love and math and everything.
I am wary of the Song of Songs, the beloved and the lover and the friends.
"I am my lover's and my lover is mine," and "All beautiful you are, my darling; there is no flaw in you," and "You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes"; "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine." It's beautiful. My God. My God, please let me get the one I want. Help me figure him out.
10.
I have this one memory of him—it is my favourite out of all of them, the one where it is two weeks before his graduation and we are sitting on his grandfather's traditional wooden house on the veranda in the back, watching the waves roll up to meet the sand and the pounding of the rain and the crash in the sky from the thunder. He is taller, I think; taller than he was before, I know that, but I can't remember if he grew anymore after.
We sat in total silence, the quiet inspired partly by awe of the magnificence of the thunderstorm but mostly because we had drifted after I departed for Italy and stayed for a few years. His grey eyes were scanning the ocean as if he were looking for something he had lost a very long time ago and was just remembering to look for it.
"Do you think we could die?" I asked him, and he just laughed a short, breathy, flat laugh.
"No, it's the ocean," he said softly, seconds from being drowned out by a particularly loud clap of thunder. "You must be stupid," he added nonchalantly. Then, later: "You're the stupidest person I ever met," he said, void of feeling.
But I had merely laughed and said to him, "No, I'm pretty smart if I do say so myself." We absentmindedly watched the sky as it filled with lightning, the blue and white highlights dancing on our faces. "You remind me a little when I was your age." He gave a soft snort. "I think I was scared. No—I was definitely scared. Here are some things that I was scared of—pomegranates, messing up my perfect math grade, getting tackled too many times during a rugby game, talking to girls… Flying on business class," I said. "Responsibility," I added.
"What makes anything about me remind me of you?" he asked.
I smiled for no reason at all. "I don't know. You just do."
Perhaps it was the future that had mellowed him out and perhaps it was Reborn who had finally shut him up, but he stayed silent—mostly annoyed as he was wont to be. "To me," I continued, ignoring his scathing, disapproving looks, "you've always been a piece-wise function. Never a step function. You know—you never listen to anyone. You do what you damn well please."
"I don't understand you," he said suddenly.
"Funny—it's always been the other way around for me," I said.
It was the first time that I've really grasped any part of his personality without touching into the totalitarian dictator part of him—us on the veranda in the pouring rain watching a thunderstorm; in terms of discrete mathematics, he was a probability problem that used a complete deck of cards, and you're trying to find the ace of spades—Kyouya—somewhere in the deck. You come up with 1.93 percent, which is normally correct, but, as it turns out, he was never there in the first place. What are the chances of that?
The thunder grows distant and the lightning is inconsistent. The rain stops. I shut my eyes and suddenly there was something cold in my palm, the jagged edges digging into my palm. My hand closed around the key.
"I don't understand you," he repeated firmly. 5000 or 5 billion? Whole numbers or polynomials? Piece-wise functions or step functions? I just smiled at him and prayed to God.