Over The Horizon

Chapter I

My father. He's all I ever had in my life. No house, no food, not even my reflection; I only had him, his body, his heart, nothing else.
I've always thought how my life would have never existed without his. Only now I realize, in the sadness of a memory, that this story, with him still in this world, can't exist.
I write about what is lost and forgotten to escape a reality I don't believe as true.
Back in high school, I remember telling my French teacher what has just been written with other words.
«We love what we do not have, forever. As we can't appreciate what we have now, maintenant, we love it when It's already too late... and forever gone.»

I believe I am now able to express my love for sailing. During his life, my father has had three sailing boats. When he sold his last one, not many months before the end of his story, it was already too late to arrive and understand this entity. It's a feeling I always had but never saw, hidden in one inch of my skin, under a scar. The truth was, I had loved his boat as much as I loved him and his kind heart. I just didn't realize of it, like everything else in my life.

After he's gone, I am too. I know it right away, I have to run, escape. I ask my mum for some money, «Can you help me?» there's no shame in my voice.
She looks at me like she already knows what I want. I know she does. Perhaps she needs it too.
She knows, she does. She needs to get away from where she is too.
That's why, like the wind, she lets me go.
My mother will never complain with my decision of leaving her. No strength was enough to stop her child from the call of an already written destiny.
She always said she had died with her husband, with the father of her only daughter, the man she still thinks she once loved, exactly like the day ends the night and the moon stops the sun from shining bright.

I leave my life to a point where I don't know what I am leaving and what I am forgetting.
I only know that I suddenly find myself in Rome, looking for a new departure.
At times, my father used to remind me the feeling you get while you cross the roman streets. This usually happened at night, yes, I see him, again, talking to a younger version of myself, searching for the right words while laying on my tiny bed with me. Walking around Rome, he said, is like living the history of the world without reading about it. No textbook gives you the same knowledge, it's a completely new sensation, like making love for the first time and remembering it as a crazy night.

Now, at the time of the writing, I can clearly see myself as a nostalgic person who doesn't know what is missing in her life. Perhaps life itself is what I am missing.
I know in some way that the story I am writing does not exist. It never will. These same words can't exist because I can't remember how I learned to write and read them.
The only way to write something and leave some words in this white, empty paper, is to hide in the history of others, in their feelings, in their pain, in their happiness. I can't help but wonder why, even now, I decide to write all this. And I don't cry, I rather tell myself that I understand: I will never move fast enough to catch that train my life will forever be waiting for.