I wrote and published this post yesterday, in Italian. I’m talking about myself, about what I did, even if I pretend to address Yuzu. And at some point I really turn to him, even though I know very well that the chances of him actually reading me are almost non-existent. But it is not important, if we are many to tell him that he is more important than everything else, some of us will be able to reach him and give him back some of that light that he emits and that is brighter than he imagines. I also know how sometimes other people’s words have been important to me, so… here’s my translation.

Nobody can know what will happen, what tomorrow will bring. November 4th, for me, should have been a day like many others, one of those we go through, living our day, and then we forget. I did not expect that pain, a pain that for me was not physical, did not even touch me directly, but that was no less real for this.

What do you do when you are powerless? When would one want to cry out against the sky, fight against the injustices of life? There are worse sufferings, I am aware of that. I have felt some in the past and will certainly feel others in the future, but sometimes awareness is not enough.

I took off the page of the calendar. I took away the day, as if by doing so I could cancel it, but it isn’t. The past cannot be erased.

I used that sheet to fold a crane. A greeting. A moment of warmth. A balm for a wound. Useless, on a practical level, but sometimes even useless things have to be done.

The next day I printed a detail of the Ten to Chi to costume, the last competition program I had seen you interpret. That sheet also became a crane.

It all started like this, you know? The spur of the moment, the pain, the desire to send you some heat, somehow. I started by chance, without knowing how long I would go on, learning from the imperfections that distinguish some of the first cranes, like that white border that is only in this crane, a little bigger than the others, and which I then eliminated, because even in small things we can learn from our mistakes and work to improve ourselves. Day after day, doing what I could do. You know it too, it is the set of small things that accumulate over time that ultimately allows you to build something big.

What I am doing is not, will never be, really great, but it is not important. What is important is the feeling behind it.

If I can say that I know you, at least a little, it is because there is a community of people who follow what you do. There are people who translate what you say into a language I understand, with texts that are invaluable to me. I wish I could really hear your words, but learning your language is not that easy. There are people who have collected remarkable archives of material, allowing me to go back in time and retrace your path from the beginning, discovering at least in part, the public part, what you experienced. There are people who do analysis, and who allow me to better understand things that otherwise I would not understand. Here… I was sure those people were having the same feelings as me. This is why I started posting photos of the cranes on internet. To combine my warmth with theirs, as well as for the infinitesimal possibility that my cranes would reach you. I don’t need to know if they really did it or not, your privacy is more important than my ego, I just need to know that the possibility exists.

And of course we talked about the cranes. Someone else started doing them, or maybe he had started doing them right away and I learned about it later. Soon we talked about the 1,000 cranes. It seems like a big number, so said. It seems much less big if you consider that, from that moment up to Beijing, it was enough to do 10 a day.

We make plans, and then we change them. If the first goal was Beijing, the National Championship would have come first, so I increased the number. A week before the competition I had finished folding 1,000 white cranes.

At that moment I stopped. Tradition says 1,000, I had reached the number, and I stopped. Except resume making a few more, from time to time. At the moment I have reached 1,160, using five different blocks of paper, and in fact you can see that sometimes the color changes a bit.

With the colored ones, however, I never stopped. One a day, I kept looking for images from photos on the internet, or taking some screenshots from videos, or photographing some photos from one of the many books I bought. I look for the photos, I need the chest, or stomach, or back, the larger areas, and your thin waist sometimes complicates my life, I cut them into a square shape and the maximum size allowed by the sheet, then I print them.

In some cases I know what detail will be visible, the vertices of the square become the tips of the wings, or the beak and tail, but the final effect is a surprise for me too. Some cranes are more beautiful, others less, it depends on the quality of the photo and what details remain visible, and sometimes my photos are ugly too. It does not matter. No, it has a little, I’d like to do only beautiful things, but I can accept imperfections. I’m not trying to create works of art, I’m expressing a feeling, and the feeling justifies some imperfection from time to time.

How long will I get on with cranes based on your costumes? I do not know. At the beginning I had thought of doing it until your first competition, but does the day of the short program, of the beginning, or that of the free skate, of the end, count? Do official training matters? And the gala? While I was wondering, you took part in the National Championship draw. The next day’s crane was made with an image of the clothes you wore that day. Just seeing you was enough to make me happy.

I’m not saying my life revolves around you, I have a life that has nothing to do with figure skating. However, when I think about figure skating, just seeing you made me happy, and I expressed it with a crane. I also did it again when you had to go to Beijing. I made a crane with the photo of the suitcase on which your name was written. You can see it below, in the photo of the box that contains all the crane-theme costumes.

Another hypothesis was to stop after having made a crane of all costumes. But what are all the costumes? Anyone from the competitions? Competitions and exhibitions? I had already come out of a limit of this type because I had done several cranes with Pooh-san, or with one of your training jerseys, or even with the crowd of the second Sendai parade, to emphasize the embrace of the people. But even in group numbers, like Cruel Angel’s Thesis, what you do is extraordinary. You don’t go out on the ice to run a program, get your score, the highest possible, and that’s it. You take to the ice to give your soul, every time, and it shows.

So no, no limits on costumes. You participated in the National Championship without being fully healed yet, something that, as always, you told us later. By now I know, if you say you’re okay I don’t believe you anymore. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. It is the only case in which I do not consider what you say at all. With you, health cannot be taken for granted, so I decided to go on until Beijing.

These cranes are far fewer than the white ones. I’ve always done one a day, not one more, not one less. The standing white one behind is the first, the one made with the calendar page. The others are all moments in your life, moments you shared with me, with us. Doing the math, when I initially wrote the post, and in the photo, there are 173, now there is one more, even if I did not take another photo to show it together with the others.

Until when will I go on? I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet. I suppose someday I’ll stop. Someday I’ll have too much to do, there will be something unexpected, and I’ll just stop folding the cranes.

With you, health can never be taken for granted. In 2011 you learned, in a very painful way, how we cannot take anything for granted. And health is one of those things that for you every now and then there is, and every now and then not.

In Beijing you got hurt again. I never believed my cranes would protect you. I am too rational to believe such a thing, even if traditions and legends fascinate me. Although I read fantasy novels and therefore, in certain areas, I have no problem with magic. You do difficult things, the risk of getting hurt is high. I don’t like it, but it is so. There are things I like even less, and even for those I can’t do anything. What I can do is fold cranes. I can also write posts on this blog, and I am writing posts. Cranes are something different.

Do you know why I didn’t stopped after Beijing? Why didn’t I stopped even though you got hurt, confirm that cranes weren’t really useful, and even if I don’t know what you will do in the future?

It’s your life, the decision about the future is yours alone, and whatever it is will be fine with me. And it will be fine because victories aren’t everything. Because competitions aren’t everything. I am happy to have followed your path in these years, I will be happy to follow it again in the future, whatever you choose to do. I am proud of your victories, and they are many, they are more than enough, for years, to say that you are the greatest skater of all time. But victories are not all.

Can you be proud of someone you don’t know? I am, with you. I cheered for many other athletes, in many other sports. I have always been happy for their victories, sad when they lost, but my support for them has never been linked to the result of their competitions. And it has never been comparable to my support for you. For them I was happy, or sad, for you I am proud, or I feel pain.

Disappointment? Yes, sometimes, for a result. For what did you do? Never. I read a translation of one of your interviews, when you recalled the night before the free program. I read a translation, not exactly your words. I would really like to be able to read exactly what you say, but even so the translations say a lot. And I felt pain reading about your feelings. Because yes, it is understandable that you felt physical pain. I don’t know how many times I have sprained my ankles myself, I have an idea of ​​what it felt. And I also understand the disappointment of seeing all your efforts thwarted by an injury. But… did you really hated yourself because you were convinced that you let the fans down?

You know, sometimes an athlete let me down. I don’t want to mention names, but I stopped rooting for different athletes, overnight, because I didn’t like what they had done, and I’m not talking about a sporting result, but about actions that I didn’t approve of from a moral point of view. This disappoints me. A competition that ended badly? It happens. The winner is only one, the podium has only three steps, sometimes the result is not linked to the athlete’s skills, or commitment, but to external circumstances, and I cheered also for skaters who have never been on those steps, because I like how they skate or because for some reason I like them.

I am proud of your results, and if you continue to compete I have no doubt that I will be proud of the results you will achieve in the future. I am proud of your degree thesis, of which I have only read the translation of an excerpt. I can also be proud of things that are not sporting achievements. Sporting results are important, but they are not everything. For this I am proud of the programs you skate in the shows, of the contribution you continue to give to the reconstruction of the Tohoku, of the way you relate to the people who interact with you, of the intelligence, sensitivity and determination that shines through all your interviews.

I am still doing the cranes for that very night. I didn’t know how you spent it until I read the translation of that interview, and even now I know little, but a deeper awareness of your pain is just a wound that adds to the sadness of the result of a competition where everything that could go wrong went wrong. I had already seen the tears in front of Matsuoka-san and Arakawa-san, tears that you have tried to hide and that only tell a part of a suffering that we cannot really know. I am doing the cranes to tell you that, although I would have liked a different result, I am proud of what you have done. I am proud of how you fought. I am proud for those two extraordinary programs which are Rondò and Ten to Chi to. Rondò, with an impressive complexity of transitions, and in which you did not leave the interpretation even for a moment, despite that hole in the ice. Ten to Chi to, with the courage to try the quadruple axel, courage that for the difficulty of the jump would have been extraordinary even if it hadn’t been the Olympic Games, and even if you hadn’t had a sprained ankle, and what you did in Beijing, in those conditions, it is something too extraordinary for me to be able to find the words to express what I feel. Ten to Chi to, with an incredible interpretation despite the ankle that betrayed you on the Salchow.

So no, you haven’t disappointed anyone. What Beijing told me, and I’m sure it told other fans too, is that whatever happens you will always give your best. That your courage and your determination are extraordinary. That sometimes things go wrong, but that it is possible to face adversity with your head held high, remaining true to yourself. That even in the worst moments, kindness matters. That sometimes we cannot get the result we have worked so hard for, but that this does not diminish us as human beings, nor erase we have already done. And that we have to work to try to build our future.

In this photo, the first crane, the one I made with the calendar page, is not there. It is a little bigger than the others, it is the only one that is entirely white, and it seemed to me that it was out of tune. My cranes are a small thing, but if I have not stopped making them it is to tell you that I am sorry for that hole in the ice, that I am angry about the decisions of some people, not yours, that I have suffered for your ankle and for an outcome that should have been different, although I will write about it on another occasion, that I was disappointed with someone’s attitude, but that my admiration for you just got bigger. You did not disappoint me, you gave me new perspectives and a priceless amount of emotions. If you said in Sochi that you have to try to lead your life with an attitude that is worthy of that Olympic gold you won, you can go ahead with your head held high, because I can’t think of anyone who represents the Olympic spirit, and the potential and spiritual wealth of the human being, more than you.