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There’s always this one moment when you realize that this is it, that this childhood obsession is allowed to be your life now, that you’ve made it playing football.
Yours comes when Palermo plays Juventus and you’re sweating through the pink jersey under the lights, shaking from fear and excitement.
But the ball is familiar at your feet and so is this run and the flash of a defender in the corner of your eye. The expanse of green opens up before you and you know you can make it. You’ve been training for this your whole life.
And then a man rises up before you like a mountain. Gone is the genial countenance, gone the two dimensional image of one of football’s greatest. Before you, Gianluigi Buffon stands, dark-eyed and huge, filling up the confines of his goal.
You hesitate, startled by the moment. You lose the ball.
Gigi is your moment, magic and cruelty both contained in one person. Palermo lose.
*
Barely a few minutes after your transfer is announced, you get a text from an unknown number.
“This is Gigi,” it says, “if anyone tells you I don’t know how to use my phone, they’re a liar.”
You stare at it, bemused. It must be some sort of mistake, or a joke someone is pulling on you, and in the whirlwind of uprooting your life, you don't have time for that.
Then an hour later, as if he’d only just remembered, you get another text from the same number. “Welcome to the team!” it says.
*
You sit next to Gigi at team dinner and you’re half drunk on the glass of red wine they poured you with a joke about your age.
He gestures with his hands while he speaks, always so stereotypically Italian, and you catch yourself staring at the arch of his fingers in the air, at the smattering of dark hair across his knuckles. They’re good hands. Safe hands.
It’s when you catch yourself tracking the shape of his lips in the dim light that you realize you may have a problem.
It’s so textbook, for you to develop a crush on Gigi. It’s even more embarrassing when you start feeling like he’s looking back.
*
The whistle goes and the world crashes down around you. At least that’s what it feels like, the sudden beat of silence followed by the roar of Barcelona fans celebrating in the stands.
You don’t know what you’re supposed to feel. It’s not your first loss, not by a long shot, but it feels bigger than that, somehow.
Messi snags you into an embrace and you listen to his consoling praises, and you press your face against his neck and you hate him, you hate him. You hate him with the lost helplessness of a child you still feel like sometimes.
You don’t look for Gigi, but your eyes find him anyway. He stands in front of the Juventus fans, watching them up in the stands. Some are angry, most are crying. Crying faces all the way up to the dark night sky.
He watches them and you watch him and the pain of it almost staggers you off your feet.
*
You catch him, in a moment unguarded, and he looks at you with such tenderness that it makes your heart ache. You want to tell him to be brave, but he’s been so much braver than you for so much longer.
So all you can do is look back, hoping he’ll read your feelings off your face.
He looks away first and the victory feels hollow.
*
You see the Italians defeated in snapshots.
A murmured conversation you overhear, a half-glimpse at a scoreline, a severe looking pundit.
You don’t see him crying until you’re in your room, scrolling for re-runs. Maybe that’s for the best.
The sight of it is painful, the weighted pride of a nation splintering across his shoulders, adding to the heavy load you know he already carries. You want to look away but you can’t because you feel like you owe him that much.
You couldn’t even deliver him the Champions league title that could have maybe cushioned the blow.
Someone knocks on your door, reminding you of team dinner, and you come back to yourself to realize that his face has been replaced by infomercials.
*
There’s nothing particular about the night you choose to come to his door. It’s not some awful loss or earth shattering realization that spurs you into motion.
Everything you’ve known, it feels like you’ve known forever.
You park your car next to his and for a moment you allow yourself to pretend that it’s something you do every day. Then you take a deep breath and get out of the car. You knock on his front door, hoping that the rasp of the wood against your knuckles will bring you back to reality, but it doesn’t. Then it opens.
You say hello and you don’t touch him when you enter, but he’s nervous to have you there. You can tell from the way his hands shake and how he stutters when he offers you wine.
You stand in the middle of the living room and you measure the width of his shoulders as he stretches to get you a glass, and your head is empty and your mouth is dry.
He turns around and he looks at you, and he says, “Please don’t say it.”
And you know that he knows and he knows that you know, so you lock your tongue behind your teeth and you take a deep breath and you hold out your hands.
The way he kisses you feels like an exhalation.
*
Falling in love with Gigi is so textbook that it makes sense that it ends like that too.
You untangle from the cage of his arms in the morning light and roll onto your feet. Every bone in your body is begging you to stay, to lay your head back on the pillow, to curl back into his chest and dream.
But you know that when he opens his eyes he’ll ask you to leave and hearing that will break your heart.
You linger for a moment, to remember the image of him sleeping for the next time you’re playing pretend. And then you leave, through the arch of his doorway into the cold morning. The sound of your car slices through the silence, and you drive away and you don’t look back.