Life lit by the moon

By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. Everything was covered in ashes, smoke and threatening flames which were getting closer and closer to our city at a colossal speed. Flames, a lot of flames. Fire everywhere.

I pulled the shutter and a cold breeze, which reminded me of a late autumn found its way into the room, into my lungs, ending its journey by giving me a severe headache. It stunned me. I dragged my feet towards the next room and I was welcomed by a dark and deplorable atmosphere. Worms were lurking between the dirty dishes in the sink. Now and then, you could spot cockroaches on the floor, acting like this was their home. The walls were lacerated by deformed lines, and only a ray of sunshine crossed the kitchen.

Run! Go! Grab the supplies, the girl and leave!

The ticking of a clock on the wall woke me up from the daydream induced by the disgusting sight. I tried to swallow but I couldn’t. I immediately manned up, my eyes fixed on the clock that showed the hour seven. I stumbled to a door, opened it, and turned my attention to the puffy clouds above the sun-drenched mountain.

In a few moments, small drops of water fell more and more quickly on the ground, wetting my tired face and ragged clothes. Water... My eyes fixed on the mountain surrounded its rough shapes. My stomach was rumbling and the next moment, my thoughts went to the meals I refused when I was just a child. Hot vegetable soup, with pork or beef and lots of parsley, rice with vegetables, chicken stew with mashed potatoes, my mother's chocolate cake... I refused them all without thinking twice. Instead, I loved a hot polenta with melted butter, fatter cream, and fresh cow's cheese. During the days when my father was free from work, he prepared this food together along side with chicken livers soaked in wine.

Where is she? Where did you hide, little one?

The images that soothed my hungry stomach disappeared once the rain woke me up. I was soaking wet and my flesh was shivering from the cold. I had glanced over my shoulder at the dilapidated house I had left and found that I had to return, because otherwise I would not have died of hunger, but of cold.

Help me, please! Help me!

It’s cold. It’s freezing. It isn’t hot. There aren’t flames everywhere.

I didn't mind wilderness. When I lived in the noisy city, people didn't bother me at all, and I completely stated that I couldn't live in a quiet place. But things have changed, and the need teaches you to cope in any situation. For a long time I prayed to God to help me to get out of that impasse, but He never thought to answer me, and the impasse slowly became my new life. Wandering from house to house, I tried to go unnoticed, clinging to life as long as I could.

I had entered the house and taken a chair from the kitchen, which I had broken into pieces with a brick. There was a fireplace in the room where I had slept the night before, but there was no wood. I had taken the legs of the chair and thrown them into the fire that was slowly dying since the night before, and the fire started growing again when I had made it a little windy with a moth-eaten cloth.

Fire, fire! Call the fireman! Do something! Run! Help me, I’m on fire!

I was lying by the fireplace and sighing for a long time. “I wanted someone to be there and cut my throat”, I had thought in the gloomy silence. I didn't even bother to look for warmer clothes. I forced myself to get up, but my steps led me to a mirror by the closet. I had wiped the dust with my hand and looked at the image in the mirror. A pale face with apathetic eyes, undereye circles, chapped and bleeding lips, and prominent cheekbones . I had become a walking corpse.

I returned to the floor, without worrying about my physical appearance anymore and closed my eyes trying to fall asleep for at least a moment...

The flames burn everything in their path, destroying entire lives in which people have struggled with all sorts of problems. I'm nailed in one place. I can't move, my muscles are stiff and all I can do is to see people burning alive and to hear exasperating cries for help. A spark flies to my coat, followed by dozens more, making my clothes only rags and leaving marks on my skin. A giant flame seems to come to life. I can see a certain sly smile and empty eyes. An arm of fire catches me and knocks me to the ground, covering me with fire. I try to scream, but the smoke stifles my lungs. I can't scream, I can't run. I'm burning to death, I'm skin is melting. I am dying.

“That evening had been the worst night of my life. But I'm also grateful” I say, staring at the little sparks that gush from the fire. I sip a mouthful of mint tea and look around, where I meet a sympathetic glance. “I wanted to die. I was tormented by nightmares about the fire that made me leave town” I continued.

“Biscuits?” Someone hands me a handmade cardboard box full of homemade biscuits.

They're warm. The steam gets lost in the dark and in the stars. I refuse. My eyes fall in silence to the infinity of the stars in the sky. I would love to be a star. They are never alone and if I were a star, I could admire the greatness of the moon.

“How did you die?” I break the silence, pointing to the person holding the box of biscuits.

“Me? I didn't even realize I was dead. I loved very much, I loved so much that I was killed. I had seen a bright white light that pierced my vision violently. I blinked often, and when I finally got used to the dazzling glow, I saw an anorexic woman dressed in casual clothes. Her shoulders were hunched over, and there were wrinkles on her skin. Small brown eyes were visible between the creases of her disheveled face. It was my mom. Remember, mama?”

 An old woman looks at the fire in silence, nodding very suggestively. You could barely see her face moving. It looks exactly as the guy with the cookies described her.

“You were small, thin, and with a neutral, lost expression. You were older, more withered. The last time I saw you was two years ago, in a black coffin and in new holiday clothes. I had asked you for signs, mama... But then, you were in front of me, you saw me - or I thought you saw me, and I still wondered if I was dreaming. You should know that the light around her seemed like a holy aura and, as if she was a holy spirit, brought before me for an unknown reason.”

But my mother was there with me. I remember here and now, how I sat in her arms at night, curled up, surrounded by her body. I remembered walking together on the streets at the foot of the mountain, waiting for my father.

I wanted to get up and hold her hand, but a force stronger than me held me in place. I looked at my mother's face, but all I saw was a careless mask looking through me.

“Mom! Mama!” I shouted at her louder and louder.

Not a muscle of hers seemed to move at my cries. In a position of complete stillness, my mother moved farther and farther away. The woman I was desperately calling back then, and exactly two years ago, was a real stranger. She wasn't my mother, she was a woman who looked like her, but she didn't talk, she didn't see me, she didn't move. She disappeared in the same gleam in which she had appeared.

“Still, not much has changed, has it, mama?” he asks ironically.

The light was slowly fading, and the place was turning into a forest with many tall trees. Suddenly I entered into a wild forest from an explosion of ​​bright light. I was supposed to dream, but it was so real... My eyes were falling sprinting from one tree to another, and my gaze stopped on a sign on a hollow trunk. I had risen without problems and immediately felt the lack of paralyzing force that stopped me from embracing my mother. My fingers slid over the crusty surface, mimicking the shape of the blood-colored mark. It was a circle with a perfectly straight line down it.

I had glanced over the path next to the marked tree and walked for a while after it. The grave silence in the forest disturbed me. Most of the time, the forest was filled with the sound of birds, wild animals and their cries a rose, but nothing was to be heard. There were no broken branches, no springs of water or leaves moved by the wind. Only the setting sun witnessed me.

I was getting out of the way when I saw a blackberry bush. When my mother and father took me on mountain hikes, they explained to me what blackberries look like and how tasty they are. I had never tasted it until I was seven, and to my shame, I didn't even know what they looked like. I grabbed a few blackberries and tossed them up, then caught them directly in my mouth. The thin skin was cracking in my teeth, and my mouth was full of a sweet-sour taste.

I was immediately startled to hear a branch cracking under someone's footsteps. I hurriedly hid behind the blackberry bush, a paralyzing panic gripping my entire body. A tall, thin boy is running, holding the hand of a frighteningly beautiful girl. That boy was me, and I was looking at myself from a bush. I was remembering! Everything seemed like a long-lost memory, but I could feel its recent warmth, somehow it had happened recently.

“What if we run away together?” asked the boy who looked a lot like me.

“You are absurd!” she replied, irritated.

Of course it was absurd. It was aberrant and irrational, and I honestly can't understand how I could ever have such a crazy idea.

“It was just a hypothetical question”, he added in a hurry, I mean I added.

There was a sublime silence between the two. I can't remember the girl's name even now, but I remember her face perfectly, with big eyes and lips, fine white skin and pink cheeks. She sat down on a piece of dry ground, clutching her yellow dress under her thighs. His thin hands fell lazily on the grass and were lost in the thick green threads. He looked at her with a radiant expression and sat down next to her.

The girl had received a flower from him. The sun had set for a long time, and the night animals could be heard from the forest. Several footsteps could be heard in the distance too, and the two hurried to their feet.

“Do you think they're hunters?”

“Why would they hunt in the evening? It's dark!” he continued.

Only the full moon shone on the strange shapes of the forest. The shadows of the trees, the thick fog and the owls gave a really scary air. “What was I doing there, actually?” I wondered to myself. The two started along the path and seemed to get lost more and more in the dark. I had also gotten up from the bush and started walking behind them. I hadn't had much time to walk, because a boy passed by me – I knew him damn well - with a quiver of arrows and a bow, without noticing me.

I continued to be puzzled by the three. The archer stopped abruptly, leaned against a tree, and looked at the two of them, while I had not been seen, even though I was right in front of him. The boy and the beautiful girl stopped in a corner of the cliffs, sheltered in a clump of bushes, where they hurriedly glanced over their shoulders, making sure they were okay and no one was following them.

It is said that people feel death when it surrounds them and hunts them down. I don't think I felt it. And I'm sure of it, because I watched an arrow fly directly into my skull as I looked at the bustling city, and I didn't realize I was dying in a quick death.

The last time I walked the narrow streets of the beautifully lit city on a chill spring evening. I could see everyone, but they couldn't see me. I passed the baker - a family friend who had helped us many times after my mother's death – and a scent of fresh bread passed me by.

“I didn't realize I was dead either”, I admit after the boy with the biscuits finishes his story. “I also had a very confusing period in which I did not understand why no one saw me. But then I got here. A kind of angel found me on a rock, looking out to the sea.”

“I was looking at the sea too” he says amazed.

A strange feeling grips me. Run! Fire, lots of fire! I feel my soul hot, and my mind seems to be on the verge of finding out a truth unknown to anyone. My gaze immediately falls on the boy's mother and I see her smile and a tear dripping from her wet eye.

“The sea is the most beautiful thing you can see after you die. We all find ourselves when we see the waves hitting life hard, and we are no longer there to feel that cold and frothy water. You should know that death was always a part of people's lives, not at the opposite pole as the poor souls in our old house believe. And angels find you when you sit facing the sea, ocean or lake.

The woman speaks concisely and clearly, and under our curious eyes, she metamorphoses into a slender, young and lively woman. The boy next to me smiles warmly, reading in his eyes the desire to see his young mother again.

The voices inside me stop. I am happy, finally, after a long time in which I listened to cries for help and saw people burned alive. They stopped.

As the stars are reflected in the water, as the waves hit the shores, as the water is always in motion, so is our life. Our life is water, and death is the reflection in a dark water lit by the moon.

I finally died.