Today I am a serene woman, but this has not always been the case. The unhappiness of my youth was inflicted on me by those who should have stayed close and be loyal to me, at least as much as I was with them. HER, indeed.

My name is Michela and I'm talking about my sister Leana, two years younger than me, who I have done about forty rounds around the Sun.

My story goes back twenty years ago, when I was a girl like many others, a university student with auburn hair gathered in practical pigtails and light green eyes. In short, nice but confused in the crowd.

She, Leana, eighteen-year-old, was blonde and with long wavy hair, inherited from our mother and daddy's blue eyes.

She seduced the boy I was with, that Louis of French origin who had made me lose my mind for a reason I don't even remember.

Louis was brown-haired, a forgettable brown, but he had two beautiful hazel eyes. Two magnetic eyes appeared to me to be a too thin reason to pursue courtship.

And instead for Leana it was enough, or rather... it was enough to cover the REAL reason, that is her immense jealousy towards me. At school I had better grades than hers and I had more friends, but my sister hadn't thought that I had earned those achievements with study and sympathy, they hadn't been given to me.

I remember an autumn afternoon, I was waiting for Louis with my nose pressed against the window and my eyes following the dance of the dry leaves.

The bell that was supposed to announce him had also brought me Leana hanging on his arm.

"Hi Michi, do we disturb you?"

I lived in a small apartment with another girl, who was out at that time.

"No, please..." I had told them, moving away to let them in, and feeling a terrifying sensation of danger running down my spine.

They had settled down on the sofa: he was silent like a fish, she was a cougar with unsheathed claws, red lacquered.

In retrospect, I have to go back of a few words: I am a serene woman, yes, but I believe a remnant of rancor from time to time will come back to touch the beaches of my serenity, because all in all I don't think I deserved a similar treatment.

"What's happening?" I asked them.

I have vague memories of the later: while Leana was talking, my brain had scanned all of Louis's strange behaviors, his tormenting his hands to the point of reddening them, his sweating even when it wasn't hot, those incomprehensible delays, since he liked punctuality.

I hadn't screamed when Leana with sadistic pleasure had slammed it in my face, THEIR betrayal, seasoned with an incoming baby.

My body was frozen and suddenly I almost seemed to see the condensation of my breath.

I asked them if it was all, cold and impersonal as a telephone operator.

"Yes... that's all."

Leana hated me, that was her revenge; had I always had better grades? She would have become a mother first. Had I a boyfriend and she didn't? She would have blown him away from me.

Oh God, he wasn't without faults either, he had been taken away by will, and he was a lifeless cod without a personality. Seeing him inert, while he made my sister talk without looking at her and without looking at me, without an intervention, he had fallen on me inexorably. Hell yeah, she could kept him.

They had left my apartment and I had cried out of reaction, and because I had been stabbed in the back twice.

The worst thing was seeing my parents filled with concern for her condition, which she displayed as if it were a trophy.

They had scolded her for taking my boyfriend, and stop.

The times I went to lunch with them, she didn't even help set the table.

"I can't make efforts!" she retorted as she flipped through teenage magazines.

The fact that she would have given birth to not even nineteen years did of age didn't touch her in the slightest, because the will to make me feel bad seemed stronger than everything, even public opinion, her health and her child's future.

The anger I had laboriously bottled was released by my mother one of those Sundays at lunch:

"Try to understand, Michi... it's hard for her."

I had a glass in my hand: I hurled it to the ground, enjoying as it shattered.

"Are you serious?"

Poor mother, she had been dismayed.

I picked up a fork and aimed it at my sister.

"You justify this... bitch, and you still have the courage to invite that stoned to your home!"

"Ah, is he stoned now?" Leana had teased me.

I had stabbed her with my eyes and she had had the decency to back away.

"No... thanks to you I realized that he has always been so..."

"Michi... please..."

Mom was crying, but I was tired of being considered strong even when I wanted to break everything, so I announced that if they wanted to invite me to eat, Leana would have to disappear.

"Don't worry, I'll be moving to Louis soon!" that one, full of lividity, had screamed at me.

The memories are interrupted by Paolo, my treasure, the one I consider my son, and by law he really is.

"Love, what is it?"

I see his lips widen into a smile, a sweetly mocking laugh.

"Mom, you make me feel small!"

He is no longer small, he is nineteen and he is handsome, tall. Certainly more mature than me at his age.

He looks at my eyes and becomes serious:

"Oh no, you're not thinking about those ones..."

"Those ones" are his biological parents, Leana and Louis.

"I can't hide anything from you..."

"No ... face it."

I make him sit next to me, ruffling his delicate dark gold hair like when he was a child, and losing myself in his mischievous eyes, gray-blue and devoid of the malevolent shimmer that always animated his mother's.

"Why do you still think about them?"

"Because... it's natural. I thought they loved me, and instead..."

"... Instead they suck."

Paolo speaks from knowledge of the facts, because he was three years old when he arrived in my university apartment, with tears in his eyes and a lost air.

I went to get him myself, with my car, under a beating water and with teeth tight for irritation.

Since his birth, Leana had proved to be an unworthy mother: by now she had achieved her goal of giving birth to the son of the man who had been mine, and so the rest didn't bother her.

She went out every night dancing, without even noticing her precious cohabitant, she let Paolo home alone with dirty diapers and piles of dishes in the sink. Even today I don't understand how my son didn't die of neglect.

As for Louis, he had turned into her doormat: he had succumbed to her charm, he was a rag over which she frequently and willingly cleaned her feet.

He wasn't able to take care of the child, he dressed him badly and cooked him vegetables and fruit that had been badly cut and boiled in two fingers of water. When my mother called to tell me in what conditions they were, my hair stood straight on my head.

I had fallen into their home by literally kicking the door, and when Louis had faced me I had pushed him.

"Where is the kid?" I asked him.

"He's in his room... Leana hasn't come back yet... she's always out, things didn't go the way I thought..."

"I don't give a fuck on how you feel, I want to know about the kid!" I shouted.

Louis had taken a few steps back, looking offended. That was rich!

"I made a mistake. Leana doesn't love me..."

"What a moving story." I commented sarcastically, picking up a weeping Paolo.

"Your son cries." I had remarked, severely.

I remember he had looked at him as if it were an alien.

"Aren't you even able to console a three-year-old child?"

I felt sorry for myself, what kind of man I would had as a husband?

I had taken Paolo from his lap and held him close to me.

"Let's see… While you are sitting here thinking about your lost love, I take Paolo home."

He hadn't objections about it, and before I left I hadn't resisted the temptation to write a note to Leana, thanking her for having taken a limp man out of my hair and having taken him herself.

"Thanks sister, I wouldn't know what to do without you!" I had written to her at the end of the message, with a little heart.

Needless to say, she had telephoned me insulting and crying, screaming that she had always been the zero of the family and that no one had ever understood her.

Her screams no longer upset me, she never wanted to see a psychologist, she never wanted to cure her discomforts, and I no longer wanted to make my life sour for her.

I had applied for Paolo's custody and I had obtained it. None of the biological parents had ever come forward to claim him, nobody. Paolo, growing up, visited them often, spent evenings with them, but he confessed to me that he had never experienced family warmth from his mother, too busy painting her nails or whining for trifles, or from his father, a man with 'the same consistency as a mollusc', his words reported in a scholastic theme and then taken up by a teacher to explain me her fears regarding that very irreverent boy.

When Paolo was six years old, true love had entered into my existence, under the name of Teresio, an ancient and peculiar name for an equally original man, but of solid principles.

Paolo had grown fond of him after a first period of mistrust, and had been more than happy to act as a pageboy at our wedding.

I had invited my sister and Louis, but they had not shown up and at that point I realized that I had lost my sister forever, but that I had nothing to reproach myself for, I had tried but she had preferred to drown in her inferiority complex and hate me instead of working on herself.

Today I doesn't miss Leana, after years of strangeness it's as if she were a distant relative; among other things, she no longer lives near us, she moved abroad with her new love and ditched Louis overnight, like a dog.

Louis still lives in that house, he hasn't had any stories but his neighbors say he recently started seeing a woman. I hope for him it's the right time.

I? In addition to Paolo, I have a ten-year-old girl, Annalisa, who loves her brother and as soon as she can spend time with him.

She has just returned from school and asked him if he can have a snack with her, diverting him from his questions about biological parents.

I watch them as they sit in the kitchen, he with the milk carton and she with the cookies, and while they eat they laugh as accomplices.

I get up from the chair and join them, suggesting that they help me make a tasty tart and get an affirmative answer only from Anna, because Paolo has to go out, he has a date.

I smile, even if melancholy brings me back, to his mother who was his age when she had him, who refused him as a broken flower, who she used for a vulgar vengeance and who unintentionally made me one of the most beautiful gifts.

I think back to his father, with whom he no longer has contacts and who hasn't searched for him anymore, because only the disease called Leana existed for him, and I sincerely hope that the woman he is dating now does not fall victim to it.

I shake my head: no more sad thoughts, Teresio will be back soon, I want to welcome him with a smile.