A Mirror of Eden

Chapter Fourteen: When the Monster Walks With the Beautiful and the Haunted

(This chapter....This one is a letter to my dad in some parts. Dedicated to him as a whole. I feel Leonardo in this one so so deeply because the day I laid my own father to rest was the hardest thing, the most painful thing, I've yet to recover from. This is what that felt like. I don't know how it'll translate to you all, but it felt like this in so many ways to me. This is a letter, made in fiction but rooted in something painstakingly real.

For anyone going through this, I am so damn sorry. It's truly something I wouldn't wish upon anyone. But we are living. Walking amongst the beautiful, even when it may all seem so damningly haunted. We are here. We are living. We are creating and telling our stories with every breath we get to take everyday no matter how big or small the chapter of our life is. Something beautiful is in wait. It's why we keep going. -T)

Leonardo Marce Sovrano

For the first time in a long time the sun was not beating down over Venice. Only light grey clouds rolled over above: tumbling and hiding the sun that clearly wasn't fighting to be seen. The slow passing of the clouds brought in the grief that was currently over floating over my heart and refusing to sink down. Refusing to burst and then drop by drop pour out into the open Red Sea of my heart and suffocate it.

As if they were trying to play catch up, the waves of the waters beating below rolled harshly with a roar to match them. Even the pristine blue that normally greeted me looked grey. The normally clear peaks seemed muddies and unclear. It called to me like it knew the pain I was only waiting to drown in and it was welcoming me to come to its pain instead. Something in me wondered if the pain of drowning under unforgiving beating tides would be less than the pain of watching a person who was supposed to be here forever be lowered into the ground in the coming ticks of the numbing pacing clock.

I was supposed to be heading down, but I couldn't move. Once I went downstairs the world around me would snowball. One minute I'd be in the funeral car. The next minute I'd be pressed against the window watching the world pass by in a never-ending blur and then I'd be at the grave. He'd be in a casket. He'd appear to be asleep, but when I called his name he would not awake. He would not answer me. He would not move because he would be but a shell. And once the realization dawned on me I wondered if the blur would even be that anymore.

I feared it would black out, and while a part of me needed that blacking out, needed to not be present or remember the numbing pain I was feeling, another part of me needed to feel it all. Needed to sit with the pain and know that this was real so that way I could stop waking up in the morning thinking this shit was just some never ending nightmare. So that way I could come to terms with this being my new reality and maybe find a way to deal with the storm rolling over my Red Sea. I didn't know which one I needed nor wanted more, and so I sat in the room staring out the window as the tie choked me slowly.

The door opened after a heavy knock, and I looked towards it. Matteo came inside and gave me a once over before closing the door and leaning against it crossing his arms.