Dreams of yesterday.

When I was little, I sometimes wandered through a scrapyard.
I always found the crushed cars strangely morbid.

Once they had been fast and beautiful, polished to a shine on Saturdays,
carrying music, laughter, and the promise of somewhere else.
After fifteen, maybe twenty years, their purpose was fulfilled,
and they were pressed into cubic heaps of metal.

Yet in those cold blocks there was something tender:
memories compacted into shape,
as if time itself had folded them carefully
and placed them quietly on its shelf.

In the early 1980s, I often traveled with my parents to the Ligurian coast of Italy, somewhere between Imperia and San Remo.
That was where it happened: I fell in love at first sight.

It was the small Fiat Uno Turbo i.e.,
an unassuming shape with a bold soul.
Its distinctive sound cut through narrow streets,
the whistle of its turbo echoing between sun-warmed walls and the sea.
To me, its 105 horsepower—packed into such a small car—felt completely insane.

It darted through the serpentine roads as if it were dancing,
light, cheeky, almost reckless.
And in that moment, I understood for the first time
that cars could be more than machines:
they were promises of freedom,
of speed,
of a life just beginning.