vittorella

I live in a little white house in the north of New Jersey, bordering on the humble city of New York. It's cute in theory. Sometimes it's even cute in practice. I have a lawn and my emotionally estranged mother planted hydrangeas out front, next to the mailbox. There's a yard for our dogs. There's a bustling grove of oak trees out back. Our neighbors have a swimming pool so the tranquil sound of running water is constant in the summer. I have my own bedroom and I can hang my theatre posters on the walls. One day, I was even brought home an automated motion-sensing trashcan. To this day, my prized possession. Still, I hate my white house.  Last night, at around 3:23 A.M. (naturally) - my father laid hands on my brother. He'd never done that before, not ever. It's not like my brother didn't deserve being hit, he's an asshole more often than not, but it reminded me of something very true. This house is alive. It breathes out memories and swallows new experie...

I've cried more tears over one girl this week than I've ever cried for her in years. Nostalgia isn't exactly an emotion I carry with me, it's something I allow to drift out my mouth, but it never reaches my brain anymore. However this week, the week of the 9th, something's changed that I want to kill through the throat. I'm weak to pain, I really am. I've remembered things I've swore off, I've renounced lovers I used to trace in my soul, and I've tried to chase this girl away. I couldn't, and that's how I've ended up here, where I never wanted to be. It's this letter of damnation or an unread text, and I simply cannot stomach the latter. So bear with me adoring readers, for this is a tale of old. Primary school was a lonesome time. I had one person who meant everything to me, because they were my entire world, an anchor to Earth. We meant too much to one another, and that became the target of this pain. Loving someone beyond reaso...

Okay, let's talk NYC for the millionth time. Home of my bloodline. Home of Broadway. Home of everything I love and everything I hate. I can't imagine a life without the city. For instance, the possibility of being born somewhere like Oklahoma is something I cannot even begin to conceptualize. I believe it's because I wouldn't be me without New York City. I asked my friend once if she could see me living in London, because they've been (hi niko!), and they said no. I was too New York for it. I remember that, out of all the mindless conversations we'd had, because they're right. I couldn't be anywhere else. To be myself I'd have to be in New York. I'm not sure why that is, how that is, the science behind it. I just know if they took me away, a part of me would be missing. Me and New York City are inseparable. My great-grandmother, my Nonna, came here in 1912. By here I mean Brooklyn, washed up on the shores of Ellis Island. I've never been to E...

 My mother has been dealt a distinctly cruel hand. She grew up mean, in the hollers of Pennsylvania, my rustbelt madonna. They passed her and the seven other kids she shared peeling walls with home to home, from town to town, somewhere they won't be found. Nobody really looks for girls once they're gone, not poor girls like her, you know? It started when she was three. With small hands and feet, soft red lips and hair the same shade as mine. Maybe she was younger, it's been 68 years now. My mother's mother is the antichrist. Dead wrong and dead evil, the old bitch was. She's been dead for years but her restless soul keeps me awake at night, and I think of the grave, and I think of digging her up, and I think of putting a stake through her heart. Three is when my mother's mother first almost beat her to death. I can imagine my mother's frame, lilac bruises down her white legs, curled up that night with a spine bearing the walls of hell. Pennsylvania has alway...

    When We Came From The Sea: A Tale Of The Italian Seaside Il sole rises slowly in the tangerine hue of the empyrean firstlight. The juice of valencia veins dragging up the rims of lush viridescent mountains, forestlands of Apennine wolves and Corsican hares burrowing into the moss-grown underbrush. These hills rest in our archaic bones, borne of the land before time. Molded by the calluses and marrow elbows of gone saints, countenance covered by a delicate milk veil. They were us, once. Scraping against our cerulean harbor, seeping below our ghostly wake. The outskirts of Naples is our birth. Years of dipping feet into azure soft waves, chasing innocence down amber shorelines. Sat atop fractured cerise bricks of our history, pulling oiled olive-toned knees to small jawbones. To abandon this fishing town was foreign, harshly curved syllables on alien tongue. Here we are our own mythology. Threading folktales of midnight seas and divine lands inside the bursting infernos of c...