The Disgruntled Lira

I make the world go round.

I’m powerful.

I start wars.

People get married to get their hands on me. Remember, Anna Nicole Smith, who married J. Howard Marshall II.

Look at how political leaders can change the values of companies to support them in the blink of an eye.

It is time for me to confess. I’m only a 10,000 Italian lira banknote. Now worth about seven Canadian dollars.

No one kills for or falls in love with me. But I do hold sentimental value for my owner, Renee Mains. She brought me to Canada after her trip to Italy in 1998, and I am stuck in a photo album of her photos and other souvenirs.

I miss my homeland, especially being pressed against those 100,000 and 500,000 lira banknotes. As a male, I never felt insecure around these women. The higher the denomination, the more I felt well used as their boy toy. But I had the most fun being in a wallet with a British pound. They were quite frigid, and I enjoyed warming them up.

To my chagrin, my family was sterilized since the Italians adopted the Euro. It is monetarist incest to insist on having one currency. I’ll never forgive the Europeans. At least, I’m stuck on a page next to Renee and her pretty friends.

Reframing is a technique I learned on the Oprah show. Things could always be worse. You had to focus on what was still positive in your life.

Finally, one day in 2015, Renee started to digitize all her photos. I ended up on her desk with lots of loose change from her trips. The change was too loose for my taste. I thought I was finally free and that she might return me home.

But you won’t believe what Renee did.

She put me in a clear piggy bank with so many filthy coins, saying, “This will help me remember all my trips to Europe from my 20s.”

The piggy bank was placed on the end table beside her sofa, facing the TV. I could finally see what I had been hearing for years at night.

I was now an official couch potato.

I miss the days I used to have a jet-set life. I travelled everywhere from bank to bank, cash register to cash register, north to south, city to city, village to village. I never had a dull moment in Italia.

 

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A year later, Renee broke up with her boyfriend, John. She was bored, so she enrolled in a creative writing class.

I’m so grateful to her teacher, Ellena Greena, who gave her class an assignment on personification.  And Renee started to write about me.

She put me on her coffee table and kept staring at me for writing inspiration. And then she would type on her cheapo notebook, sitting on her purple vintage sofa.

Finally, I had hope. My story would be told to the Creative Writing Class I, coded 2743.

I know Renee brought me to Canada without any ill intent, but I was still here against my will.

Surely, someone in her class hearing the story would be Italian and write to the Italian President and Prime Minister to demand my immediate return to the homeland.

I had hope for the first time in decades. Surely, my government would demand that I be expedited to Roma by first-class mail. They would have to put me in the Italian Bank Museum. I'm part of monetary history.

I also had to pray for all the displaced coins and paper money worldwide.

A chance might come for all of us to return home.