We Are Home

An Italian body, with everything it once was, was about to reunite with an American mind, with everything it did — inside the silences learned from mother Gillette and her singular teachings.

I knew how to respect the wait. Never in a hurry. The lesson I had learned was this: everything comes to those who know how to wait — without urgency, and even more, without expectation.

Being someone who asks for nothing has always been an unknown quantity. Not being purchasable takes power away from a man. But taking without asking permission — that was my teaching. The way every woman in the world is genetically accustomed to doing.

One day we found ourselves in the same bathroom, at the same hour, in the same moment — my father and I, shaving. We both had the same meeting at the same time, and the rule was always one: arrive early, never on time.

He paused a moment to study my shaving ritual and noticed something that surprised him. The first pass across the face went from bottom to top, against the grain. The second covered the center. Only the last pass ran from top to bottom. And smiling, he asked me who had taught me.

I looked at him carefully. He never spoke without reason. I had to decipher his true intentions. But there was only one answer: I learned it from you — from the time I was five, always watching you shave every single morning. Even when he was sick with a 104-degree fever, he would get up, shave, and go back to bed.

And the thing I noticed was that he never went against the grain on that last pass. Because he used to say the rough part is a man’s identity — if you’re too smooth, you become a woman.

That evening in May 2030, I was walking through the streets of my Boston. Memories kept resurfacing. A few tears framed my life, that whole journey.

I was alone only physically. But mentally I was surrounded — by everyone who had ever given me a phrase, a joke, a story, a tale, and had filled my memory. And I had learned as a child never to forget the details. Because they are the foundation of every serious conversation. It had always been that way.

It was time to settle accounts. And that’s always done after a game of poker on the stairs, before heading home — never before.

GILLETTENARRATIVE had first appeared on the radar. Then it had been placed under watch. Then checked and verified. And only after that did it become what it was born to be: a story.

Everyone always asked the same question: how could I have given everything away for just 1 USD — and how could I have built it all on just 70 USD a month.

The answer was found inside an image.

I was inside the cabin, in front of the fire. And across the river I looked at Boston’s Prudential Center Tower — which had been my mother’s home during the years she hosted me. And I always had the same thought.

I could have enjoyed knowing what it feels like to live inside a skyscraper. But I was free to stay exactly where I was — for one reason alone: I was free.

Nando The Scribe. Someone you don’t expect to exist. And yet, he’s real. And you’ll always find him inside what he did — never inside what he said.