There are two major types of events in our life. There are events that are more or less important and that we remember now and then, and which according to the degree of their importance, disappear little by little, until they totally fade away with time. There are others, however, that have marked us and are encrusted in our brain, where they forever remain in the form of memories. Whatever happens, these events do not lose even a hint of their clarity and vivacity sine the first time they happened. Indelible, they are here, awaiting us as soon as we open our eyes in the morning. Sources of sweet nostalgia and melancholy, and sometimes of pain, bitterness and regret, they caress our eyelids before sleep at night. They are present as soon as we perceive a similitude in another smile, another tear, a certain note of music or a particular fragrance.
Your loss belongs to the second category of events.
Five long years have passed since you’ve been gone, and still, it seems to me as though it were yesterday. Nothing has changed in the house, but everything has changed in my life; there is nothing but a frightening and a swallowing emptiness. You left too big a vacuum to be filled. What a sapless tree, what a dewless rose, what a vulnerable orphan I turned out to be without you!
Everything in the house reminds me of your absence; and yet, everything paradoxically reassures me that you are not too far either. Your favourite coffee cup still hangs on the kitchen shelf. Your grey jacket is in its usual place, on the left chair of the sitting-room. Your favourite blue pillow has not been removed from the couch. I preciously kept, unused, the silver pen and the bottle of perfume—yourlast gifts—to be able to recall as clearly as possible the day you gave them to me. The ashes of your last cigarettes are still in your old wooden ashtray. Even the smoke of your cigarettes seems to linger in the air of your room, where you used to read the evening paper and watch football matches. And outside, in the parking lot, the place where you used to put your car is empty and locked, as if waiting for you to come back in the afternoon after work. All these objects help me cling to a remote past in order to survive, and yet cruelly lure me by making me believe you are still somewhere in the house. I am struggling to make concrete your impossibly retrievable presence, but it is late, too late to retain even your shadow here.
Since you passed away, I have become the prisoner of a stifling routine. The whole book of my life seems to be composed of one page in which all my days are alike, identical in all aspects. It seems to me as though time has stopped since you left. Even the dining room’s clock stopped ticking the day you went away, the very hour you went out never to come back again.
Everyday, I start as I hear the doorbell or the sound of shaken keys, yet I know it is not you. I wake up and make coffee, though I have nobody to give it to. I throw a look at your beaming smile in the picture frame; my only source of light in the morning. Then, I play the CDs you have offered me, which, by excessive use, are no more of as good a quality as when they were new, and whose songs have been so much heard that they are now totally meaningless. After that, I go to the front window of the sitting-room, from which I used to wave to you as you left for work in the morning, and have a look at the street in search of a voice, a laughter, a face similar to yours to revive some pictures and moments related to you. I make sure to take all my time in order to fetch your words, your jokes, your pieces of advice until the recollection of each memory turns into a blazing red ember put on my heartreducing it to ashes.
As usual, after wandering desperately about in the ghostly house for hours, torn between the repugnant present and the wonderful past, I decide to pay you a visit so as to avoid listening to my heart’s lamentations, which echo so clearly in the heavy silence enveloping the dwelling. Once in the cemetery, I walk among the familiar graves while the same fresh breeze blows softly, making me feel as if all these serene souls resting beneath, and who provide you with company, joyfully welcome me again. I pass by the graves of the seven members of the family who died in a road accident some time after you, and stop there for a few minutes. I stand a while looking at them and mechanically reading the poetic epitaphs on their gravestones. Then, I say some prayers for them with the selfish feeling that with them lying here you are no more alone. A little farther, I walk by the young woman crying, as usual, over her son’s grave and listen, though less moved day after day, to her cries and lamentations that used to make my flesh creep.
Everything in the house reminds me of your absence; and yet, everything paradoxically reassures me that you are not too far either. Your favourite coffee cup still hangs on the kitchen shelf. Your grey jacket is in its usual place, on the left chair of the sitting-room. Your favourite blue pillow has not been removed from the couch. I preciously kept, unused, the silver pen and the bottle of perfume—your
