⸺ 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 | ᶜᵃᵉˢᵃʳ ˣ ʳᵉᵃᵈᵉʳ [ᵘᵃ]

| 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 |

It was on this December 4, 1918 that I stood in front of this greyish tombstone engraved with your name, accompanied by my mother as well as yours who is more devastated than ever, to hold my arm as if to prevent me from join and who had wedged his blond head on my shoulder.

The armistice had been signed and the war for which you had fought and for which you had laid down your life was therefore over. It was the end of the fighting, of the bombing, of all the suffering that soldiers like you had endured for four consecutive years.

With my other arm, it was with melancholy that I held between my fingers this necklace that you had given me a few days before leaving the house. Its silver chain still intact like the first day it came out of its box and its little greenish gemstone that still shimmers as powerfully as your emerald gaze now extinguished and closed.

With a touch of bitterness in addition to this unforgiven melancholy, I delicately placed a bouquet of flowers comprising roses adopting white and pink tones between the plates quoting sentences transmitting regrets such as: "To our son" or even "We forget never what we love", tightening my little heart already cracked by your departure.

Despite all the pain I was feeling at the time, I hadn't broken down, and I won't break down, I won't cry, as you so kindly asked me as your last wish but sadly, the pain that I had constantly stored deep inside me would eventually come out one day or another and so I couldn't stop this tear from rolling down my cheek, then this other tear, then these others.

My hand having dropped this necklace so precious to me, was seized by the hand of my mother who had surely noticed that I was crying with deep pessimism, fists clenched.

⸺ I wish you were the one to take my hand Caesar... I thought

I raised my wet and weeping eyes towards the sky covered with whitish and grayish clouds which paraded slowly in the air and when my glance rested on a particular cloud, I believed to see there the shape of the face of the man that I had loved and who always had this same place in my fragile heart which smiled at me tenderly.

My crying intensified and my pain and suffering increased even though I was smiling under my tears. It was so beautiful but so hard to see his face again after more than a year without him by my side.

A light gust of wind blew through the branches of the pine trees behind us, through my hair, which danced to the rhythm of the wind, and through the clouds in the sky. The cumulus that looked like Caesar's face was pushed by the wind and deformed, thus making the portrait of my blonde disappear and making the cloud normal and neutral again.

⸺ Don't you miss it my daughter ?

⸺ No... No because he's here. Undoing my hand from hers, I pointed to the place where the memories and joys that I had lived with him were, she smiled. He left as a hero, as a savior for the holy homeland of France.