I first met Rulla in Venice, on a day of exams. We were both waiting to give one of the many at the department of fine arts. She used to wear certain kinky tigerish glasses back then and always a black short skirt, obviously her long curly straw-yellow venetian hair were all about her. She was fun and carefree and lighthearted. I was already this grave boy but more sociable back then. I think we fell for each other, life was about to give us a great passion... we ended up moving together in a little apartment in St. Polo where we lived for almost three years, although the real passion was alive for the first six months at most, before we even moved in together.
Later the passion developed into something different, equally intense but totally self-destructing and perverse and crazy. There were fights, objects thrown, threats, cheating, promises, cries, fake suicide, slaps in the face, reconciliations, kinky stuff and more cries and resentments and self-destructing choices. We were always broke and always behind with the exams and always sad and unsatisfied and stupefied by all the unhappiness. It dates to those times the insane habit I grew to bury myself into the computer to overcome my sadness and the feeling of being out of place.

I finally got the job at the university of Milan and left Venice, because of Rulla-- and I knew the city wasn't going to be a place for me anymore.
As often happens with the wrong habits me and Rulla never really completely moved on... we sort of kept in touch in the following years. Mostly it was her calling me, and since I was --like her, but in a different way-- badly wounded by our story and weary and selfish, sometimes I ignored her calls, worried to get more of her cries and reprimands and desperation.
But we never really let go the thing. The sexual attraction never really faded, and instead placed itself into a particularly scary and sometimes attractive place inside our minds. For a while we also had moments of getting together to fuck every now and then-- as sometimes happens.

Then strangely all the mistakes and the things never told faded into the past and left nothing but the pipes and wires of some sort of edifice we once had had and that was now nowhere to be found, like a razed construction site, footprints of the old structure squashed and deformed in the dirt by the following plans, as we loved and re-loved other bodies, and our bodies were loved, declaring different things with similar words and tones, making new errors and choices above the old ones.

Recently me and Rulla started to hear from each other more frequently. Now one can call the other, normal day, and we just talk about our lives. I learned to listen to her without being scared or self righteous as I used to and I finally saw, how strong and brave and generous she had been during her difficult years. How in different ways we both managed to overcome the worst aspects of our characters, and all the craziness that we experienced when we were together and afterwards. I came to feel that it really had been one of those unique things in life to witness, this twisted path we had jointly followed and separately.

Today Rulla called and said she was pregnant of her boyfriend, with whom she has been living for a year or so. Because of some surgery she had to undergo in the past the news were two times shocking, and the minute she said "I'm pregnant" I wanted so badly to hug her and make her feel how happy I was for her, how great it was and it was going to be, so much that I felt my eyes on the verge of tears. I mean, I think it was sheer happiness for her --I still can feel it right now as I write, if I only think about it-- although I can't rule out other kinds of feelings I might have felt (maybe I stupidly wanted her to hug me too).
The more evident of these feelings could be that our paths are really separating now. Our two lives are going to be growing so differently and on not contagious levels now. This is "right", and inevitable and this rightfulness is what makes it sad on a certain level, I guess.
Also, many of the women I have been with and loved are becoming mothers, so much that I am becoming an expert on the matter. But I am a man, and I can't be a mother no matter what I do. This is no little thing. It is one of the many way life actually has to tell you that your gender not always works for you. At most I could become I lousy father, and the only time I got close to that, with Libi, it was hell at first and then unbearable pain and later on only a memory hard to swallow.

Libi... she came home that I was still talking with Rulla on the phone. She found me in the bathroom sitting on the edge of the tub rambling about names and silly fears. Later me and Libi got to the mall and I told her about Rulla and after a while Libi said she had nausea all day. I thought it was ridiculous. I hoped life wasn't going to be that ridiculous. Or maybe I didn't hoped, I just wondered if.