Gepetto died last night...
I do not know the exact moment that his heart stopped beating but I woke up around midnight and I didn't hear his whistling snoring, the silent murmur of his old heart beating in the rhythm that used to carry me towards distant dreamlands.
Even wooden puppets can dream, did you know?
Before I woke up last night startled to death by that terrible silence and stillness that was surrounding our little wooden house, I was dreaming of the sea...
I have never really seen the sea except for in a little postcard I found one day on the street but Gepetto used to tell me stories about it and I had always imagined it as a gigantic mirror into which the clouds are reflected...making faces...
I knew it from the second I opened my eyes that something was wrong, that while I was not paying attention, my life had utterly changed and there was nothing that I could do but act accordingly.
Whatever that meant...
I guess that deep down inside I knew that Gepetto will not always be there for me...that when his mission would be complete he would disappear and let me live by myself the life that he had prepared through his teachings, his love and his incredible patience....
I didn't go and check if my feeling was true. I guess I was not ready to see him standing there lifeless...with his now empty eyes looking behind me....towards the nothingness of death.
I have a few broken memories from the time I was just the wood that Gepetto had carved me into so I can definitely tell you something about what being dead means but that part of my memory is not a place that I like going to too often...
I just stood in my little bed....almost tasting the silence and the feeling of being completely alone for the first time in my real life...as a living doll.
I stood there thinking of the nights that laid ahead...with no one to tuck me in, to hold me in his arms when there would be a storm outside and my little legs would shake like castanets for fear of the lightning...a fear I felt deep down inside my wooden being...a distant memory from when I was a tree at the reach of lightning and furious winds.
I thought of my life without my maker... a life I never wished for and never imagined because some things seem like there are going to last forever...in spite of the evidence that nothing lasts forever...
I was pulling the blanket closer and closer to my eyes as the moon was entering my room making the shadows move along the walls and I remembered about my birth...
Gepetto had made me unarticulated fingers and I couldn't grab anything... I kept dropping all the things that he asked me to bring to him and even to this day you couldn't find two matching plates in the kitchen because I kept breaking them until he had the time to make me the articulate fingers that were now casting curiously shaped shadows on the grey wall.
I had been the luckiest wooden puppet in the world and I only realized it the moment that it all crumbled to painful pieces once with the morning which was creeping through the curtains.
I had always wished for more...to be a real boy...for Gepetto to be more understanding, younger so that he could run with me in the park...
There were hard times when I blamed Gepetto for creating me…when I was looked at strangely by those who didn't seem to understand how can a puppet come to life and how can someone love someone or maybe something that seemed to be nothing more but a bunch of useless pieces of wood tied together by something that might have been black magic.
The thing I understood that long night was that it was not the magic of the Blue Fairy that has brought me to life but it had been all the time Gepetto's love, and caring...
...and my need to be loved, and be taken care of....
And now he was lying lifeless....a few steps away from me and I couldn't cry for I had no tear channels...and I could never tell him the things I never thought of putting into words before, and the things I thought I had all the time in the world to tell him...
I meant to tell him I love him every night he was putting out the lamp but I had always assumed he knew it and there was always tomorrow...
Now he is gone....still here in a way....his body at least but he cannot hear me, and I still cannot find the words to tell him about the way he made me feel: loved and special...unique...
I had always envied real boys who would run faster than I could with my thin wooden legs, who could write better than I could with my clumsy fingers...who had real parents and could FEEL, not just IMAGINE the taste of ice-cream...
I had never seen Gepetto looking at other children in the park and wishing for me to be different from what I was and had been all along…his special wooden boy, his creation and his gift from the Big Puppeteer...
My first night all alone had passed and I survived it..
The morning found me shaking Gepetto's lifeless body asking him to come back...because I was not ready to face the real world, I was still a child and wanted to be so for a few more years...
I was begging him not to leave me alone for I was not ready for real life and there was so much I had to learn with him by my side...
When he didn't answer my desperate calling I called for the Blue Fairy to come and as she gave life to me...to put back life into Gepetto's old body....
She didn't really come although I felt her close and I felt her answer to my prayer deep down in my heart..
It is much easier to bring to life a wood puppet that desperately wants to live, than to return the free spirit of a human into an old, tired body...
I also felt that Gepetto had let go of life only because he was sure that I would be fine, that he had taught me all the lessons that could be taught and not lived and from now on it was up to me to create a new life for myself....a life lived and cherished in his memory.
This is the first page of the diary I will keep from this first day of my life without my maker...
The day has passed and the night is the only one embracing me...and will be for a while..
Its embrace is cold and velvet blue but it comes with dreams in which I can return to happy moments in which I find the strength to face tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow...and so on…until I will be strong enough to be on my on...
This is the beginning of a diary and of a life...both dedicated to Gepetto.
I love you Gepetto....wherever you are..