These are such sad and desperate days that the reporter in me has no words, can't and would have no reason to write anything.
I was not prepared.
I could not and should not have been prepared.
The car accident that ripped Edoardo Sbianchi from his life happened on the night of September 14th in Milan, but only now I find the strength to talk about him.
Edoardo was not only a young friend and the son of two people I love.
Edoardo was much more, he was the good part of the future.
And the future, especially when you imagine it to be bright, is not written, but dreamed.
I have dreamed more than once of you, standard bearer of the new generation of Italians in Kenya, like when in your naive but already badass 15 years you told me that when you grew up you would have liked to become Italian Ambassador in Kenya.
I would think of you after every AC Milan game, as you would write to me every now and then after a Genoa game.
Today we would be on whatsapp discussing Ibrahimovic's Achilles tendon, Liverpool and some hopeful goalkeeper, like you.
I often have to write about compatriots who leave us.
In these last two unfortunate years it has happened far too many times.
Often, and in spite of my sorrow, I usually think "fortunately", they are elderly people, historical Italians who had something to do with Kenya, lived there or frequented it.
Having been involved for more than thirty years, many times I found myself writing with tears wetting the keys, remembering friends, acquaintances, companions on a journey with many similar nuances.
Yesterday, for example, marked the two-year anniversary of the death of my dear friend Mario "Max" Aquilino, who was my age.
Not you, Edo.
You weren't considered and you're not even considered now while I'm here thinking about you in Malindi.
Not only because you were twenty years old, and your disappearance is in itself a theft, a bastardy, an injustice within injustice, but because as far as I knew you were a wonderful boy, so different from most of your peers.
You were so because you knew you were lucky, you knew you had charisma and possibilities, you knew that in order to make many of your dreams come true, all you had to do (and that's not little, but it's a lot to be aware of) was to get busy.
The hope of a world that doesn't throw itself away, that doesn't drown in ignorance, leaving the dry, dishonest, frustrated and mentally ill to send it to the scrapheap, that hope has your smile. I use the present tense because that smile is in front of me, it stays with me, with Maddy, with her parents Fabio and Francesca and it will have to be the guide for her little brother Lupo.
It's the same smile you had when you handed out gloves and shoes to the kids at the soccer school we support. And that day you didn't limit yourself to accompanying us to get to know a reality light years away from you, although linked by the common thread of the game, of lightness, of happiness.
You donned the gloves and put yourself in the goal, you incited from start to finish your occasional companions to defend well, to sprint in attack when the ball was thrown to them, to be united and compact, to go all together, with stubbornness and knowledge of the cause, but without ever losing the taste for fun, towards the future.
This is what I want to talk about when I talk about you, Edoardo.