Baggio

Gladio has two problems.

The first is that there is only an hour until the editor arrives. An hour, with twenty five pages written and none worth seeing. An hour, an hour, an hour, an hour.

59 minutes now.

This is what happens when he thinks.

This is what happens when he tries to enjoy his life.

This is what happens when he feels like he needs to live.

When he tells himself he has worked enough to warrant a break, and spends his whole break wondering why he isn't working.

He ends up here.

Sat on the laminate bathroom in a hotel that's charging him eight euros a night for tourist tax, sweating in a hoodie, feeling the sun cream leach off his skin as his body wonders why the excess hasn't been cooked away by the thirty degree sun outside.

Why? You ask. Why isn't he outside?

Well, I don't think he really wanted to be there.

I think he only only voyaged to this place because the writing has been laborious, and he lives in seasons of productivity and reprieve, and he thinks that when the genesis engine of his creativeness loses it's oomph, it's time for a little active recovery...

But really, all that aside, it's because he doesn't want to feel like he's wasting his life.

So you he went travelling.

Ticks another place off the map.

Starts again.

Gladio would say he does this because he has dedicated his life to a 'craft' when he is trying to disguise his imposterism and sound vocational.

He would say this while only really having the endurance to write for 2-3 hours a day to maintain stability, but then getting dragged in and building up to 5-7 hours in spurts of 2-3 weeks with a little depression and spiritual fatigue in trade off/punishment/narrative confirmation.

The writer has their own tourist tax, you see. That force he commandeers to his directive: That masked, hooded entity that owns certain jurisdictions of his mind, only works in trades.

A little for you, he says.

A little for me.

And after the little man's arduous time working, he has taken these eight days for himself. It has been an eight day comedy skit, where he has sat and laughed as Gladio pretends to be like the daily thousands who trod over his footsteps in these tourist hotbeds.

Tries to be like all those with families, or partners, while all alone.

And even all of those alone like him are not like. They stride with a sense of self, a fashionable strut and certainty about the execution of their itineraries, knowing that they are a confident, well-cultured individual.

Gladio has always had a foundational disliking for the confidently competent, that he likes to attribute to the little man. But it was present even before awareness of that figure arrived.

Think of the cheery sports coaches who don't know why he can't run quick, or the youth club people who try to get him involved, or the caving instructors at those boyhood camps who smile as they nudge him into the dark.

Gladio isn't competent.

He knows that as the timer ticks 24 minutes (40 seconds). Knows that if he were competent, he wouldn't have to add this part in retrospect. Knows that if he were confident he wouldn't second-guess himself every time roads fork.

Go right, and arrive home safely.

Go left, and....

One hour. Eight days.

Does he go right, to where he has been before, back to that self-deceiving narrative of a destiny he might never see?

Or...

Left.

Blindly.

Dedicating his life to this act, for the feeling of that one moment in millions, when he comes up for air, and his breath tastes like a pleasure so thriving it's ludicrous. Closing the lid of the laptop, looking up and out of the window, feeling a force flush through heart, to head, to heels and back. A throb in the finger tips, a curl of the toes...

And he chases it, like those Nuns across the road chase heaven.

He chases it, despite coming to hate it.

You hate it, despite the knowledge that it's the only thing you really think you can see yourself doing every day for the next thirty years of your life without tying a noose.

You know it's for you, despite everything you write being so terrible.

And that is why, as Gladio writes, he thinks.

To go onwards, or left?

Safely home, to what the editor expecting, and another cycle of what has been and passed?

Or....

Or, write a prompt. A random prompt. One of five. The fourth.

Write a prompt, set the time, and with nineteen minutes twenty left, see what the first things to write were:

Were any moments in the last week worth this?

The wonders of ancient stone.

The pasta dishes.

The marble graces of eternal legacies.

What has he done, this last eight days?

What was he looking for?

Scenery.

Can you truly take in any scenery when the sweltering sun melts you?

Connection.

Somehow, sharing a space with 3,000 other people all bespoke in the transience of their direction left his feeling more disconnected than ever.

Relaxation.

Spa days, in a pool not deep enough to swim in. A sauna that needs ice, so you have to keep hopping out to fill the scoop?

Eight days, eight days down to this one hour, and he hasn't gotten it right. His papers are scattered, his pencil is snapped, his eyes have that dryness that couples with a swell behind the forehead, and holds the upper half of his visage in permanent frown.

Was anything worth it?

Anything. Anything. Anything?

One thing.

The architecture?

Wondrous, but no.

The food?

Likely the best a pasta will ever taste, but who cares?

The hotel breakfast?

Ah, now that was a marvel. But having the pleasantries so close to hand left his morning routine fulfilled too soon.

The damned bidet in the bathroom, then?

An exotic experience, but nothing noteworthy.

No, not the bidet. But the bathroom?

The bathroom...

Back to the sliding glass of a dwarfish shower, feet pushed on the door, with tailbone in the crease of laminate.

The bathroom.

Is this not like home? A low-roof, over four thick walls? Destructive posture, and a drink waiting to be spilled by his side? A space of mirrors, only, no windows. Far enough away from the world for the quieting of anxiety. Closed away, to dance and sing and stare at blank walls...Yes, yes, the bathroom. The bathroom.

He feels it, as the time ticks 40 minutes 37 seconds. Feels that pressure possessing the mind fall down the valve by the back of the skull. Feel his legs stretch, feel the hum in his throat.

Feels that magic patience of the craftsman he wishes to be. That devout patience, as faithful as the routines of the priests in Basilica Saint Maria Maggiore across the way. Patience, to fall away, and belong to the destination in mind. Permission, to stop time, to sit there until they arrive.

The keys feel so soft, the tips of the fingers in a buzz, as the acceptance arrives.

He will not leave this place until the prayer is done.

He belongs to these four walls until he finds the problem, or the problems find him.

And at eighteen minutes 40 seconds winding down he knows where this has gone.

Confession.

With editing he could do something here.

a running metaphor on the pious practitioners of this city.

But he'd have to think for that.

And thinking led him here.

On a bathroom floor, alone.

While the world enjoys itself outside. But he isn't alone, is he?

And there, in said bathroom, lies the second of Gladio's problems:

There is a tiger at his throat, breathing by his neck.

His name is Baggio. His eyes are blue, his stripes are brown, his fur is white. Not like snow, no. Not like any descriptor he can find in this moment. Just white. dirty, real. It said at the bioparco that all white tigers in captivity originate from a founder called Moham, who was first captured in the 1950's by (he has 13 minutes 36 seconds to finish this and find out).

Baggio was born of no Moham. Never tamed, nor captive. Born of dream Gladio had when he was around eighteen or so. A dream, where he still lived in his humble country, and his humble home, but for some reason owned a tiger. No explanation of how, or why.

I like to think that Gladio would have rescued one, perhaps from an overzealous drug lord in the city.

I like to think Gladio might have the chops to tell that story one day, but I highly doubt he can pull it off... But he had this tiger, and it had no name before I wrote this. And in this dream, this tiger of no name existed as if spliced into the reality of Gladio's life. With his dogs, on his wooden floor, in his room...

Spliced, only a few months old, and yet Gladio's mother already loved it. Already scolded Gladio for babying it as he was.

And if Gladio could remember his dreams as well as the true creatives of his time, he would tell you the many episodes they shared in that one eight hour period of sleep.

But there are only 8 minutes and 48 seconds, so he won't get there, and he is really trying to veer left here, and give the editor something they have never had, and most likely won't want, so he is writing wishing that this meets the 3000 words limit and thinking that surely somebody can't break it in an hour.

But, yes, there was Baggio, and Baggio lived a life in that one night.

A life, that as Gladio writes, keeps him by the lonely man's side, with all the other little pieces of pets and people he has bound to his memories, anchoring them forever to earth.

But unlike his many dogs who have left and the one grandparent who he actually cared about and hopes one day to meet again one day when passing a butterfly, or breathing the air half a world away still carrying them away, Baggio is not sweetened by sentiment and nostalgia.

He is fully grown.

Not as he is in the dream.

But in a way of his own.

In four minutes 30 seconds I might try and tell you how that hooded, masked figure, presiding over those most ghetto jurisdictions of Gladio's mind, has sharpened his teeth might fine. Sharp enough to stop time, and hold Gladio hostage, pinned to this shower wall, until he founds the problem, or the problem finds him.

In three minutes eight seconds, he might go back and correct all Vaggio's to Baggio's.

He might found out the details of the white tiger's founders.

Maybe even chose to delete this whole confession of a sorry, solo traveler.

Either way, when there was an hour left to go he was faced with that choice, of safely trekking back home. Of 2 hours, 1000-20000 words a day of a shitty draft that he likely doesn't have the endurance to withstand, reform and complete.

But in going left, he has come here.

To this place where he questions, as he always does in these cycles, if the last months of his life have been a complete waste, and if persisting will just ruin the next.

He has come to the place, and given the tiger a name, and a force with which to pin him, and force him, and demand, and command and hold his fangs to his throat.

And as we go over the hour by ten seconds to finish with something witty, I can't find one, so I will say something about the caving instructors at the boyhood camps telling the weeping Gladio that he can keep left in the dark and always find his way through.

Maybe those competent, confident individuals that he thought could never understand him, had actually said something worth listening to?