Throughout my early 20s, I had a recurring nightmare. I had been travelling since 2010, when I was 19. I started with a summer job in Greece, then I took another job in Egypt, then Spain, and finally I moved to London, where I stayed for five years. I was having a lot of fun, making enough money, and I was proud of my independence. But in my nightmare, I would find myself back in my hometown of Verona, living with my parents, jobless. It was the worst thing that I could imagine happening at the time, not because I didn’t love my parents, but because it would have meant failure.

Of course, my nightmare would eventually become reality. Around 2013, I began to struggle reconciling the life I was leading with the Christian values I’d been brought up with. I was going out every night, meeting a lot of people, and sleeping around. But none of it felt meaningful. I was starting to feel like I was going nowhere. I had a “career” in hospitality management, but I didn’t want it. 

Then, in 2015, when I was 24, I met Maria. Maria was a Polish waitress at the high-end London restaurant I’d just joined. She was my age, had a bachelor’s degree in “National Security”, whereas I had never even finished high school. She also had one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen. I remember the first time I saw her at lunch break. I walked up to her, smiled, and introduced myself. At first, she was taken aback by how confidently I had done so, but then she smiled back. Already then, an older manager who had witnessed the scene whispered to me: “Good luck.” 

The same manager would later tell me that pretty much every guy who worked at the restaurant had tried to date Maria, but she wouldn’t go out with any of them. This, of course, only made me more interested. She was young, beautiful, smart, and a challenge. At the age of 24, I was extremely confident and arrogant. I was also more experienced than my colleagues and drew a lot of attention from the customers behind the bar. Perhaps that did it, or maybe she saw something else in me, but she returned my interest from day one.

My relationship with Maria remains the strangest I have ever had. We flirted every day and texted every night for months, yet the first time I managed to go out with her wasn’t even in London. I approached her one evening at work and told her I was going to see friends in Barcelona the following weekend. Her eyes lit up, and she said she was also going to Barcelona that same weekend and that she had already booked the flight. What were the odds? I was thrilled. 

The next weekend we met in Barcelona. The trip went as well as it could have been imagined. I rented a scooter and drove her around the city, which I knew very well since I had lived there. I had friends in all sorts of places, so it was easy to charm her. I didn’t try to sleep with her. For the first time, I wanted to do everything properly. We shared a kiss the second night when I dropped her off at the hotel, right after she had thanked me for giving her “the best time of my life.” I said goodnight, and I flew back to London the next day. 

Back in London, things started to get really weird. For the next few months, every time my relationship with Maria seemed to be progressing, she would take a step back. She’d say things like “I can’t,” “Trust me, you don’t want to get to know me.” Then she’d lean forward as if tempted to kiss me or hug me, only to pull back and walk out. The whole thing was confusing. The only thing I knew about her life was that her father, whom I had met once when he came to dine at the restaurant, was a former Polish intelligence officer, and they shared a flat together in West London. Her mother, in Maria’s words, was an “evil bitch” who had divorced him.

I felt like I was losing my mind. Finally, one evening at a company staff party, which I’d been looking forward to as a chance to make something happen between us, I could no longer keep it together. After warmly greeting each other as usual, I left her to go to the restroom. I’d decided that I needed to confront her somehow and provoke a reaction. I locked the door, washed my face, and took a big breath. Then, as I looked up in the mirror, a grin spread across my face. But not a confident one. More like something had taken me over.

***

Whenever I try to reflect on when my nightmare began, I always return to that evening in front of the mirror. It was the last time I talked to Maria. I barely remember what we screamed at each other. I headed straight to the bar afterwards and started to flirt with a Portuguese hostess I knew was into me. Maria ended up vomiting for an hour in the restroom before leaving with another guy and collapsing at a nightclub. I left with the hostess after getting kicked out for punching the restaurant wall for getting into an argument with our bouncer, who I’d later find out was a friend of Maria’s father, and also in love with Maria. He had confronted me after our argument and told me to leave her alone. Later, he followed her to the nightclub and beat the other guy up.

The next day, the HR department started an investigation into what had happened. Before they could find out, I had already given my two weeks’ notice. I stayed in London for another year, got fired from two successive jobs for insubordination, and briefly lived with a Spanish girl, who turned out to be a sociopath and thief. She stole over £3,000 from me. I trashed her signature clothes when I found out, smashed the brand-new TV she had bought with a hammer, and decided it was time to go home. I packed my bags and headed to the airport. Just as I received a text from her gangster friend saying he was looking for me, I boarded my flight to Verona.

The first fortnight at home wasn’t as bad as I feared. Seeing my parents was good. But they soon left to spend the summer at the lake, so I was left to my devices. I got a job as an F&B manager at a boutique hotel, owned by one of the richest families in town. But their spoiled son and his wife were treating it like a toy, and within a month, they’d stopped paying us. One evening, myself and a coworker decided to steal some expensive bottles of wine to make up for the money they owed us. In the event, I fell down the stairs on my way to the wine cellar and dislocated my shoulder.  

At last, broken, at home, and directionless, I was living my recurring nightmare. I spent the next two weeks resting without leaving the house, barely eating, drinking whatever my dad had left behind, and getting high. A few days later, I almost died.

***

“Why?” 

“So I can live.” 

That’s what I heard in my head before I opened my eyes. I was stuck beneath a car that had been dragging me for a hundred yards, drowning in my own blood. 

It all happened within 24 hours. I was running out of money. I needed to stop drinking, smoking (not just weed), feeling sorry for myself, and find a job as soon as possible. So I picked up my laptop and started composing my thoughts. But it was more like I was attempting to manipulate them. Think of it as a form of “reverse-psychology blog-therapy” on myself. In a way, I succeeded—or at least so I thought. The following day, after staying up all night getting high, I threw the cigarettes away and felt no further need to smoke. But before I could even get to the next item on the list, I was manic. Not only was I not depressed anymore, but I was the happiest I had ever been. 

My psychotic episode had begun. I went to the bank and took out the last few hundred euros I had left, and gave them to a homeless guy. Then I walked around the city, then outside, then back inside, then outside again. I never hallucinated, but it felt like it at points. I was starting to see “signs” everywhere: color patterns, numbers, people. Strangely, I had a thing for mirrors: I needed to avoid them. It wasn’t self-therapy anymore; I was looking for my way out of the Matrix. As this was happening, a dangerous thought started to form in my head: I needed to test myself. I needed a challenge. I needed to know how much pain I could take.

By the evening, I was totally insane. Spooked by witnessing a crowd of people at a fair, I arrived home. Then, some time past midnight, as I was writing poetry in the kitchen (I’d never attempted to write poetry before in my life), I heard a noise in the parking lot below the building. It was a quiet August night, and I hadn’t heard a noise in hours. I took it as a sign: follow the noise. But it was 95°, and I was only wearing my boxers, so I went into my bedroom to put on some pants. As I turned the light on, I saw myself in the bedroom’s mirror. It was the first time I had seen myself in hours. I grabbed a dirty pot that had been lying on my desk for days and smashed the mirror. As my reflection disappeared, it felt as if I had killed my ego. Now I was ready to descend.

The noise I had heard was from a young man who had been visiting a friend in the building next door. He was about to get into his car and go home. But that’s not what I saw. He was driving a gray Hyundai Tucson, which looked similar to my dad’s: a gray Ford Kuga. It didn’t matter that I knew my dad would never leave the car outside for months. At that point, every single thought that entered my mind, firing at the speed of light, was The Truth. It was my dad’s car. He was stealing it, and I had to stop him. Finally, it hit me: I had found my challenge. 

***

The grin on the man’s face as I stood up from beneath the car was different from the one I saw in the mirror the night I broke up with Maria. It was a look of disgust and resentment. He was an old man with gray hair, in his 60s or 70s. He was standing on the other side of the alley, staring at me with the most hateful face I had ever seen—but also somehow welcoming.

Meanwhile, the young man who was driving was still in the car. He was calling an ambulance. I had walked up to him as he started the car, still in my boxers (I had forgotten to put on my pants), and thrown myself inside through the driver’s window. It was dark, he was terrified out of his wits, and so he instinctively sped away. My memory is a little blurry from that point forward. Weeks later, I was told by forensic police that my hand had gotten stuck beneath the seat belt as he pushed me out of the car. The young man was already halfway down the road by the time that he realized it, and my leg had been scratching the asphalt for a good fifty yards. I will spare the details, but I lost 40% of my blood that night.

After he stopped, my adrenaline levels were through the roof, so I felt almost no pain. After four or five attempts to stand up with my leg in pieces only to fall back to the ground, I leaned against the nearest fence on my side of the alley, grabbed it, and stood there waiting for what felt like hours. I remember the young man coming out of the car and telling me that an ambulance was on the way… a first responder flashing a light in my eyes… a white light… then black. I woke up in the ICU hours later.

I was later told that there were no witnesses to the accident. The old man with the hateful face was a hallucination. But why was I hallucinating a man I had never seen before? Deep down, I knew who he was the moment our eyes met. 

***