You will never be Italian. You cannot speak Italian, you have no cultural connections, you have no citizenship. You are an American man deluded by The Sopranos and The Godfather into a crude mockery of an authentic Italian.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back real Italians mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your skinny, pale appearance behind closed doors.
True Italians are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed humans to sniff out ethnic outsiders with incredible efficiency. Even mutts who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to an Italian. Your facial features and mannerisms are a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to convince a drunk Italian guy, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a look at your lumpy, overweight, half-breed body.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the fat and cholesterol from McDonald’s creeping up like a weed, ready to crush your arteries under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll bury you in a Protestant church in Wyoming, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a mutt is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably American.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
