The Taste of Everything Else

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© Annalisa 2025

Monday had its own precise smell. The smell of coffee not yet ready, of darkness slowly giving way to the grey light of March, of silence about to end.

Helena always woke a few minutes before her alarm. She had never quite understood whether it was a gift or a curse, that body trained to anticipate noise, to never be caught off guard. She would sit on the edge of the bed, bare feet on the cold floor, and wait. Wait for the dark to become something less final.

The room was small — it always had been, you never really get used to it, you just resign yourself — and things fit inside only because Helena had learned the art of not wanting too much space. The nightstand with the lamp that didn't work properly, the wardrobe with the door you had to lift before pulling open, the chair buried under yesterday's clothes. Everything the same. Everything in its place.

She was twenty-three years old and had been living like this for almost four: in precarious balance between who she was and who she might become, between a city that had never been entirely hers and a job that, on the other hand, had become exactly that.

She got up without making a sound. She had perfected the technique over the years, like a climber studying every handhold: the exact spot where the floor didn't creak, the right amount of pressure on the door handle. The others were still sleeping — Irene, who worked at a perfume shop and considered Monday mornings a form of personal violence; Anita, who had the deep sleep of someone who already knows the day will be long. And then there was Stefania.

Stefania was the only other creature in the world capable of waking at six in the morning with something that resembled willingness.

Helena was still looking for her socks — one under the bed, the other who knows where — when she heard the unmistakable creak of the door in the next room. Then light footsteps in the hallway, then two gentle knocks on her door.

"Hele. Are you awake?"

"No," she answered softly.

"Perfect. Then come make coffee with me."

✦

The kitchen in the early morning was the best place in the apartment. Not because it was beautiful — it wasn't: the countertop was chipped in one corner, the window curtain had been crooked for months, the stovetop coffee maker made a wheezing noise before deciding to work — but because at that hour it belonged only to the two of them. Before the day truly began, before everything took on its usual frantic pace, there were those twenty minutes. Twenty minutes Helena guarded like something fragile.

Stefania had already opened her book on the table — Systematic Pathology, volume three, a brick-coloured brick that Helena had renamed "the enemy" — but she wasn't reading it. She was staring at it with the expression of someone thinking about something else entirely.

She had her blonde hair pulled up hastily, black-framed glasses on her nose, an oversized sweatshirt that was probably Gianni's and that she wore with the nonchalance of someone who never wakes up thinking about what to wear. She was a pretty girl, Stefania, even if she was probably the last person to believe it — something Helena had understood almost immediately when they'd met, and had never quite managed to make her see.

"How many left?" Helena asked, nodding toward the book as she poured water into the coffee maker.

"Four. Four exams and then it's over."

"It seemed impossible, three years ago."

Stefania shrugged, but there was something proud in the gesture she was trying to hide. "It seemed impossible to me too. But you never let me say it."

Helena smiled without answering. She put the coffee maker on the stove and leaned against the counter, arms crossed, looking at the bitter grey sky beyond the crooked curtain.

People had told them, over the years, that they were a strange kind of friendship. Too different. Helena pragmatic, quiet, hands always smelling of vanilla and butter; Stefania studious, methodical, books always open to three different pages at once. And yet no: they had found each other in exactly the way you find someone when you stop looking and let things happen. They had found each other at seventeen, in the one year when Helena had changed schools, cities, lives. In the hardest year.

She didn't think about that year often. Or rather: she tried not to. But Monday mornings had the flaw of being quiet, and in quiet, thoughts did what they wanted.

✦

Her mother's name was Maria.

She had died in October, in the October of Helena's seventeenth year, and there was something cruel about it having chosen autumn — as if the world had wanted to be heavy-handed, as if the grief weren't enough without the scenery. The falling leaves, the arriving cold, the shortening days. Helena had never forgiven autumn for that coincidence.

It had been a Thursday afternoon. Helena was at school, in her fourth year of high school, studying languages. She was trying to make sense of Latin syntax — the most useless language in the world, she had thought at that very moment, as if her brain wanted to keep busy with the wrong things — when the vice principal had walked in with that expression. Helena had read it before she even opened her mouth. There is a body language that doesn't lie, that comes before words and makes them unnecessary: the gaze fixed on you, the pace slightly too slow, the excessive care in every movement.

She had thought: no.

She had thought: not now, not here, not in front of everyone.

And then the vice principal had said her name, and she had stood up, and everything else had become muffled, distant, as if heard through a layer of glass.

Her father was already at the hospital when she arrived. He was sitting on a plastic chair in the corridor, hands resting on his knees, his back straight with that rigidity Helena had learned to recognize as the alternative to collapse. When he saw her and stood up, she walked toward him, and for a moment — just one — she thought everything might still be different. Then he held her, and in the way he held her she understood there was nothing left to wait for.

The months that followed had taken the shape of emptiness. Not the calm kind, the kind you can cross in silence — an active emptiness, one that pulled, that changed the shape of rooms and the weight of hours. Her father had closed himself inside himself with a speed that was extraordinary, as though he had only been waiting for permission. Helena had spent the first six months staying. Not going out in the evenings, being there when he came home from work, cooking things he didn't eat. Talking to him about things he didn't hear.

She had tried. With everything she had in her, she had tried. But grief doesn't divide if there's no one willing to take it from the other side.

And then, one day, something changed.

Not immediately, not obviously. But Helena had learned to read her father the way you read difficult books: with patience, looking for the subtle signs. And it hadn't taken much: the way he left earlier, the phone he always carried with him, the fact that sometimes he smiled to himself looking at the screen, that small, quick smile he tried to hide. Helena hadn't said it out loud even to herself, for weeks. As if naming it might make it real before she was ready.

Her name was Benedetta. She had understood that before they were even introduced.

She was forty years old, with two small children — two-year-old twins, Thomas and Nicolò, two blonde, noisy creatures who methodically destroyed everything they touched — and a way of moving through the house that betrayed too much familiarity, too much ease with the spaces. As if she had already been there before she truly arrived.

Helena hadn't hated her. She had wanted to, perhaps — it would have been simpler, would have given the anger somewhere to go. But Benedetta was kind, genuinely kind, with that slightly cautious gentleness of someone who knows they're on delicate ground and treads carefully. And the children were wonderful — small, chaotic, beautifully unaware of everything — and Helena adored them from the very first moment.

The problem wasn't Benedetta. The problem had never been Benedetta.

The problem was the evening her father had told her, in the same flat voice he would have used to discuss the weather, that Benedetta would be coming to live there. With the children. Soon.

Helena had nodded. Had said okay. Had gone to her room and stared at the ceiling for an hour without crying, without being able to cry, with that dry and precise sensation of having become transparent in her own home.

She went to see her aunt Clara the following weekend. Her mother's sister, forty-two years old, single, with a small, tidy apartment in the centre of a city an hour and a half away. Aunt Clara who smelled of lavender and spoke little but understood everything. Who had listened to her sitting at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cup of chamomile, never once interrupting.

"Come stay with me," she had said at the end. "For a while. For as long as you need."

For a while. As though both of them didn't already know, in that moment, that Helena would never return to that house in the way you return when it is truly yours. They both knew. Neither of them said it.

Helena had said yes before she even realised she was saying it.

When she returned home and spoke to Benedetta about it — her father wasn't there, and perhaps that was for the best — Benedetta had tried to convince her to stay. Gently, with the right words, with that careful kindness. But Helena had already decided, and Benedetta had eventually understood. That evening, when her father came home, they were both there waiting for him.

He had listened. Helena had looked for something in his face — a hesitation, a crack, even just the reflection of regret. Instead nothing: he said she could go. In the same flat voice, the same blank expression. As though he were approving a form.

That night, packing her bags, Helena had understood two things. The first: she was making the right choice. The second: sometimes the right choice hurts more than the wrong one.

✦

The coffee maker started its wheezing, then made up its mind.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Stefania, watching her from over the rim of her still-empty cup.

"Nothing." Helena took the coffee maker off the heat. "The usual things."

"The usual things" was their code for everything left unsaid, the vast and unmapped territory of their respective pasts. Stefania had her own: five years of high school with a sister who didn't see her, five years of convincing herself she was exactly what others said she was. She went back there too, sometimes, in that way she had of touching her hair when she felt watched, that defensive gesture that had stayed with her like a habit she hadn't quite broken yet.

Vanessa. Even her name had a specific sound in Helena's head. A sound she didn't like, and tried not to visit.

Stefania had loved her sister enormously. She still did, in her way. And perhaps that was exactly what Helena could never forgive — not Stefania, but Vanessa — that ability to be loved despite everything, to occupy space even when she wasn't there.

"Are you going to work?" asked Stefania.

"Like always."

"I envy you."

Helena laughed — a short, genuine sound. "Sure. The bakery at seven on a Monday morning. A dream."

But it was a little true, actually. And they both knew it.

Stefania could have afforded her own apartment — her parents would have paid for one without blinking, Mr Bianchi was a man who had never let his daughters go without. But Stefania had chosen differently. She had chosen this kitchen with the crooked curtain, this noisy coffee maker, these twenty mornings a month with Helena before work. Helena had never asked her to. Stefania had never mentioned it. It was one of those things that lived between them without needing to be named, the way the important things do.

✦

She left when outside was still just an idea of darkness. The air had that dry bite March can give when it means it, and Helena pulled her collar up without slowing her pace. The car was parked at the far end of the street — a green Peugeot 206, a colour her aunt Clara had described as "relaxing green" and that Helena had always found simply ugly, but to which she was attached the way you become attached to things you didn't choose.

Aunt Clara had given it to her the year before, when she married the man next door — a calm, fifty-year-old widower who had been courting her with methodical patience since she'd moved into the building, and with whom Clara had eventually fallen in love with the genuine surprise of someone who had stopped expecting it. "It's not pretty," she had said, handing over the keys, "but it runs." And it did run, yes. With a creak on bends and heating that took forever to warm up, but it ran.

Helena opened the door, threw her bag onto the passenger seat, and started the engine.

She hadn't covered two blocks when her phone vibrated on the dashboard. It was Marco, the bakery owner.

The screen read: POWER OUTAGE. STAY HOME TODAY.

Helena stared at it for a moment, then pulled over. She read the message again. Outside, the city was beginning its ordinary noise — metal shutters, a motorbike in the distance, the corner bar's dog barking at nothing.

She didn't know what to do with a free morning. She wasn't used to it.

She stayed still for a few minutes, hands on the wheel, staring without seeing the brick wall in front of her. Then, almost without deciding to, she put the car in first gear and started driving again.

She wanted a coffee made by someone else, for once.

— End of Chapter One —