By Lorenzo Cultrera
Milan, December 4, 2024. 7:15 PM. It’s cold, but not cold enough to stay home. It’s the kind of chill that dries out noises, muffles them under poorly closed jackets.
I have a date. A cinema, a girl, a midweek evening. I go down to the garage. The motorbike is there. Wait. On the shelf: two helmets. Mine: sporty, with Venom drawn on it. And then there’s my father’s AGV, airbrushed by the Borgo Panigale company, red, white and black. More comfortable. Quieter. More well-worn. I don’t think about it. I take his. I put it on. And I leave.
I know the route well. Centrale, Ghisolfa, Piazza Firenze. The city flows by, guilelessly. The traffic lights seem to slow down to let me pass. The helmet retains the heat of my breath. My hands feel the metal of the handlebars. I’m not rushing. I’m just going. It’s a suspended moment, one of those in which life feels weightless. Where there’s still nothing that hurts.
I arrive on Via Gallarate. A road like many others. A crossroads. Nothing special. Then, a black car. It cuts across my path. I veer to the side. I avoid it. But the bike loses grip. It goes up onto the sidewalk. It smashes into the window of a shop that was closing.
I get thrown off. I don’t go into the shop. I stop first. Then darkness. Time breaks in two. They found me there. A broken nose. Fractured ribs. I couldn’t breathe. The helmet held up. I didn’t.
When I opened my eyes again, everything was white. Plastic, machines, regular sounds.
It takes me days to realize that I’m alive. More than a month and a half in a coma. My body fought while I wasn’t there.
Then, my voice comes out as a robotic whisper. The first thing I say is: “Where am I?” And at that moment, I truly didn’t know. Where I was. What I had become.
The helmet. They told me afterwards, with surgical precision: “If you had been wearing another helmet, you would have died instantly.” And I knew it. I felt it on me, in my chest, in my hands that were shaking when I thought about it again. The helmet I wore was not a sports helmet, it was a sports-touringhelmet . But it was the right one.
My father’s AGV. Red. White. Black. Airbrushed by Rossa, the same company as my motorbike. Softer, more rebellious. But stronger than me. It absorbed everything. The impact. Destiny. The worst of the fall. Mine, the one with Venom drawn on it, was left there, on the shelf.
Sporty. Beautiful. Useless, that evening.
I came back slowly. From darkness to light. From stillness to breathing. From unconsciousness to thought. Walking, talking, remembering have become new verbs. Every gesture regained. Every day torn apart. My father was sleeping in the car outside the hospital. My mother held my hand even when I couldn’t hold it back. I didn’t do anything heroic. I just got back on my feet.
But I know that the helmet, which was my father’s, was chosen for me. It acted as a barrier. From shadow. From a silent legacy. And today, every time I look at it, I don’t feel nostalgic. I feel full of respect.
Because that evening, in Milan, it wasn’t a movement that saved me. It was a choice that seemed trivial. And yet, was everything.
Milan. 4 December 2024. 7:15 PM. I start the motorbike. I’m leaving the garage. The wrong helmet saves my life. The right helmet, perhaps, would have let me go.
