All I Have

Chapter 3 ~ Is Something Going to Jump Out and Bite Me in the Penis?

'Marzia!' Emilio shouts from the other room, 'You ready? They'll be here soon!'

By the time Leo finally emerges from his study late into the afternoon, I had already painted a new section of the wall that we hadn't managed to cover yet.

His sad smile at the bright colours almost makes me feel guilty for doing them, considering it's usually something we do together. He runs a hand longingly over the first paintings to ever appear on our living room walls.

'It'll be alright, you know.' Emilio had said to me. Even at twelve, when I considered that maybe Santa Claus was real after all, no matter what Charlie said, I didn't believe him. After all, I could see the truth in his eyes. I could see that he didn't believe his own words.

And how could he?

At eighteen years old, he wasn't exactly an expert on child psychology and grief counselling. An expert on a lot of things, including ancient Japanese torture methods, but he didn't have the authority in his voice for me to believe his promise.

That was two days into my life with Emilio and in that time, I had only emerged from my room three times, twice to get food and once to go to the toilet, as well as one time in the middle of the night that Emilio didn't know about to retrieve some more DVD's for my TV.

Shock horror children, Netflix wasn't around when I was a pre-teen.

During that time, Emilio had come into my bedroom every half an hour on the clock, attempting to coax me out. There was promise of cookies, the cinema, a fancy meal, anything, just as long as I put some jeans on and got out of the apartment.

And despite his valiant efforts, he had failed miserably time and time again.

That's when we struck gold, and I say this literally. On one of my visits into the horrifying outside of our living room, I had knocked over a tin of golden yellow paint Leo had been using to decorate some ornaments.

No doubt this was my mother's idea, spouting from my favourite colour and love of little decorations here and there around my room at home, back in Alania. I knocked it over, and it had splattered all over the freshly painted walls.

I thought Leo was going to shout at me. I thought he would be really mad. But instead, he simply took a seat on the floor beside the wall and picked up a paintbrush.

He then proceeded to spend five minutes using the gold to create a beautiful, but very wonky tiara on our wall.

At first, I thought he was insane. I actually looked at him as though he had just painted a pentagram in the living room. And for twenty minutes, I watched silently as he moved between the kitchen and the living room walls, ransacking any paint left in the cupboards and drawing pictures to make me smile.

Safe to say, it worked. I might not have made it out of the apartment that day, but it was the start of our relationship. A relationship that began with a wonky tiara, a bunny rabbit and a knight in shining armour protecting a princess in a castle.

Those drawings to this day still appear on our wall and every Christmas eve, no matter how our year has gone, or if we've had a fight that morning about the turkey, we sit together all night and reapply the paint so that they never fade away.

I glance over at the princess, and then to the painting beside it, a more recent one that shows a girl with a bright red umbrella in the rain. It's a mirror image of a photograph Emilio took of me last year when we went to Paris for the weekend.

The artistic difference is astounding and it's by far one of my best pieces of work, but all things considered, the knight and princess has remained my favourite, and always will.