I can be your weirdo, baby
The Italian expression botta di culo, funnily interpreted by Google Translate as Ass Bang or Ass Blow, in reality has nothing to do with the least honourable part of our body or, even less, with the idea of hitting something or someone with it. I have tried to question Google on when and how the Italian buttocks and their size have started being associated with the concept of luck (Che culo che hai= What an ass you have = You are lucky / Che gran culo che hai = What a big ass you have = You are so very lucky!) but found nothing at all. I can explain you though that, if the last two expressions refer more to a long-lasting lucky condition, the botta di culo rather describes a moment of super luck, something that happens so unexpectedly to almost resemble a miracle. Something like the whole universe and its elements getting together to provide you with an unforgettable moment of glory.
The word luck is nearly absent from my daily vocabulary. Having every night a roof over my head, good health, plenty of food, family and friends who love me, I am well aware of living in a privileged condition and very rarely invoke Lady Luck to ask for more. With the essential covered, I consider the rest, a job that I enjoy, a good quality of life and a nice place to live, the result of personal effort rather than the effect of good or bad luck. No matter what the size of your (metaphorical) ass is, the dream job will never come and knock at your door and the changes you have been dreaming of will not just fall from the sky and take form by magic. If you want things to happen, you need to work your ass off for it, rather than expecting it to work for you.
Now, despite being a massive fan of the GetWhatYouGive rule, I recently started accepting that it really does not work all the time. In fact, at the moment, I struggle to see what rules, if any, apply to the inexplicable merging of two people and their exclusive feelings towards each other. Love, relationships, dating. Whatever stage you might find yourself into, from the first interest you have towards that one human being and nobody else up to a forty years marriage, the whole thing seems to be messy and highly unpredictable.
I was told that, as you get older, you get to know yourself and what you want a lot better so that recognizing if the complete stranger you just met and feel attracted to for no obvious reasons can actually give you what you are looking for, becomes easier. In fact, there was a time when I used to look at my fellow human beings in their thirties and think they had it all figured out. Not that I expected my brain to be suddenly infused with some knowledge that would magically turn the various WhatTheHell into a IGotItUnderControlNow as soon as I turned thirty BUT I was at least hoping in some kind of clarifications or clues on how to get closer to the HappilyEverAfter. Six years later, I have surely learnt a lot about relationships and myself. I know that sharing your life with someone is a never ending work in progress and does not become any easier as you get older. I know how every person we meet leaves a mark on us and there is no reset button available to get ready for the new one to come. I know what is important for me but also that compromising is necessary, although I am very unsure on where the balance between tolerance and cheating on yourself actually stands. I know that there are a hell of a lot of wrong reasons why people get together and experimented a few of them and can only hope to be able to recognize them should it ever happen again.
I know all of this and still cannot quite understand how the whole process works because even with the best knowledge, intentions and conditions, things can still go hopelessly wrong and there is just no way to predict it. However the most surprising part is that despite the messiness, unpredictability and complications, love still happens. Despite all the odds we can still walk into a random place and find that person that smells right, feels right, tastes right. Someone who by magic makes you forget about the past, dream about the future and put this weird idea in your mind that nothing could possibly go wrong this time.
So, here is me thinking that maybe there is not much that needs to be understood or explained, no rules or philosophy that could in any ways make sense of what keeps two people together. Let’s be honest, to find that person who would not only put up with our messiness but also find it pleasant and for you to feel the same way at the same time, you need a giant, fat botta di culo. And I am not talking here about being lucky or unlucky, but rather trying to say that it takes the whole bloody universe getting together and all of its elements to be in the right position for something so rare to happen.
I like to think that the person who first introduced this expression in my beautiful, beloved, native language, was a poet. Not a real, successful poet, but just somebody whose hands and words would constantly exchanging roles in being either too rough or too delicate. I like to imagine his face, the one of an open book, stumbling into a pair of eyes that matched his handshake in intensity and his tall figure suddenly engaging in a funny, short dance before losing the battle with gravity and ending up with his ass and dignity right on the floor.
What happened after that, it is not for me to see. Maybe the shame dried all the words while the pain killed all the rhymes. Maybe the book of his face closed down while her eyes turned the page away.
But I think he knew that moment was not to be forgotten and so he wrote. Not about luck, not about love, just something really silly about a bruise and some big buttocks.
“Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,
what will result from compounding
Fluids or solids.
And who can tell
How men and women will interact
On each other, or what children will result?”
“Would you save my soul tonight?”