Brooklyn:
After being forced to spend one summer in Italy with her grandma, Brooklyn always found her way back to the cobblestone streets but not for the feeling of a summer never ending, but for Valentino, a boy who radiates trouble and sees throu...
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POV: Dima "Dying is the easy part, living is the trick" A time before Valentino and Brooklyn
Sometimes I wonder which is more important: the brain or the heart.
The brain is something humans could never really understand, the way it could generate ideas from nothing, imagine the vivid most things, and store information like a filing cabinet, but that's not the part I'm most interesting in.
The brain can drive us to things the heart couldn't, murder, torture, steal, based off some type of made-up logic we tell ourselves to validate our actions. Sometimes we are driven to do these things without choice, just because we were born with it.
The heart was something couldn't be explained. It holds all our passions and what drives us to feel even the smallest things in life. It's the reason why I get to smile at the old memories of my mama and strive to live just another day, but the heart can also be dangerous.
The heart can drive us to our own deaths, our own heartbreak. The complicated feelings it brings it our lives is the price we pay for those wonderful feelings we experience and like amateurs, we do it all over again. The heart never learns its lesson.
My mind constantly races with these thoughts as I walk down the alley with my white shirt that now looks black from dirt and the pants that are now too short for me. My papa always told me I would big and tall when I got older, because of fast I would grow out of things, little me was so excited, but now I hate it. I know I must look horrible and sometimes I wonder:
Don't these people feel empathy for me?
A boy on the streets by himself after his father died of simple fever, because he couldn't afford medical care, but as humans we are naturally selfish. They don't care for how I got here, as long they get to go home to their families at the end of the day. I used to stalk families for months, watch them from outside their windows as they eat dinner. From outside they were picturesque, the perfect family with a happily married couple with 2.5 children. It wasn't until I stalk a family that wasn't so nice, a husband uses to beat his wife in front of their children that I realize I didn't want a family anymore.
These streets are all I need to survive, and I'm okay with that. The streets can offer me more than anyone could. I think this as I search the trash can of a restaurant nearby, thanking myself when I found pasta noodles barely eaten. I try my best to contain my excitement after I found a rooftop not far bar I like to watch. What makes it special is that its just not a regular bar, I can tell from the fancy the cars and people are.
I eat my noodles as I watch a tall man dressed in a perfectly tailored suit get out of a car. I marvel at expensive he looks with a watch that shines even from where I'm sitting. I notice the beautiful woman who he opens the door for and hold his hand out to.
A gangster disguised as the perfect gentlemen.
Once the couple headed into the building, I finish up my noodles and looked up at the night sky and then down at my black scuffed shoes. That was the day that I swore to myself that one day I will be that man, that I will have the car, woman, and money. So everyday after that I would study that man, the way he spoke, walked, and even smiled. I picked up books on business and I would read until my eyes burned and worked until my hands were rough with callous and scars.
After all that, I only had one more thing in my plan to do.
