Comeback

11- An echo

Sanem

I have no idea where I am or how long I've been here, the days for me are now nothing more than a sterile succession of meaningless moments, waiting for the few hours of artificial peace that the drugs I'm given every night provide. Only thanks to those drugs I can find a space of quiet from the perpetual anguish in which I live since then, since he turned his back on me and left me.

For some time now, however, something different has been happening, evidently they must have changed the composition of the pills they give me, because now I often have visions, beautiful visions.

In the early hours of the afternoon the nurses take us outside and make us sit in the garden, for me until recently it had no meaning at all, I couldn't perceive the beauty of the place or the colors of the day, but for a few days now I have begun to have wonderful hallucinations: I see my albatross. It is always beautiful, exactly as my photographic memory had fixed it in a thousand images indelibly printed in my mind, it looks at me, smiles invitingly and raises its hand in greeting.

At first I struggled to register his presence, it was just one frame among the multitude of frames projected incessantly in my head. Gradually, however, these visions began to attract my attention, because never before had I seen images other than those experienced with him in the year together.

But these are different, he really seems to be among the trees in the park, sometimes he is leaning against the trunk of one of them, other times I see him popping up behind a hawthorn bush or at the end of a tree-lined avenue. His image seems so alive and vivid that I almost feel the urge to get up and go touch him.

Even my wonderful artificial night dreams have changed, until recently they were only clear images of moments already lived together, while now not only do I see him but I distinctly hear his voice whispering tender words, begging me to come back to him. I distinctly feel the light and loving caress of his hands on my face and hair, it's amazing how vivid these feelings are and how good those moments make me feel.
It feels as if his caressing voice and gentle touch are healing inch by inch the deep wounds of my battered heart.

It's as if somehow I hear myself being called by a distant echo and I, waking up from a deep sleep, am beginning to feel the irrepressible need to follow that voice and reach her wherever it is.

After months of total immobility in an immense nothingness, I feel the need to do something, I feel the urge to move towards that voice emerging from that huge black hole in which I fell.

I don't understand what is happening, but something is changing.

My survival instinct is telling me that it's time to react, to stop sinking into an abyss of despair and to try with all my strength to get back to the surface, to look for the light, to get back to my albatross