When I understood, I walked out.
First of your room. Then your apartment. Then my head. Finally, my heart.
Each exit was a small amputation. Precise, silent, irreversible. The kind of pain that doesn't scream — it simply stays there, constant, like a weight.
Once again my desires, my feelings, my entire will became the plaything of fate. And this time I cannot make it pass with the usual inner alchemy I have always used to turn loss into something useful. This time it doesn't work.
Why does no one ever last that long?
It isn't a rhetorical question. It is the real question, the one you ask late at night when there is no one there to ask. Who asked for this pain? From whom? When? Who took it upon themselves to decide for me — without consulting me, without warning me, without even giving me the chance to prepare?
And what am I supposed to do with all this anger now?
I don't want to free myself from this nightmare by taking shortcuts. I don't want distractions that help me not think about it — not thinking about it is surrender disguised as relief. And don't you dare give me advice. No one knows what is in here, and anyone who thinks they do is badly mistaken.
Introspection after introspection, I found myself in a wild world.
I am exploring places where reason is no longer enough on its own — where the concepts that usually hold things together give way, where maps stop working and you have to move by sight, trusting something you cannot name. It is a territory I did not know, or perhaps only knew on the surface, without ever truly setting foot there.
I am in this world in an atrocious solitude. Never before have I felt so alone. Never, at the same time, have I found so much of myself. It is the strangest paradox I have ever had to inhabit: the fewer we are, the more of me there is. As though your absence had made room for something in me that could not exist while you were present.
I don't know whether that comforts me or frightens me. Probably both at once.
We were so alike, Mike.
You looked at me. I saw you. There is a difference — an enormous difference — between being looked at and being seen. With you, the second happened, and that isn't common. It isn't something you find easily, and it certainly isn't something you replace easily.
So I ask you — knowing that the question is strange, perhaps absurd, perhaps beautiful: under the laws you now have to obey, and only if you believe it would be useful for both of us, can you tell me which frequencies I should tune into to hear you again? Which spectrum of light I should turn toward to see you again?
It isn't madness. It is the most honest attempt I know how to make.
I have not lost myself on this journey. Never. And fortunately I was taught — by whom, I couldn't say with certainty — to leave markers behind me in case I ever needed to return. I scattered colored stones everywhere, inside me and outside me, so I could find the road home. Not necessarily to walk it again — but so I would not forget where I came from.
Every mask has fallen. I have never been as honest with myself as I have been on this journey, Mike. And I will be forever.
I will be forever, exactly as I was honest that night when we sang Cutugno at the top of our lungs in a bar with some older men we had never seen before, arms around one another as though we had known each other forever. One of those nights when we shook off the weight of an uncertain future and became, for a few hours, children again at last.
“Do you remember?” I asked.
“I could never forget,” you answered.
Neither could I, Mike. Neither could I.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too, Angels,” you answered.