TWO LIKE US

CHAPTER 5: DYLAN

Back in the trenches I pretended nothing had happened, I went back to my duties normally, as if a few minutes earlier I hadn't literally risked having my brains blown to pieces by an opposing soldier.
I was in my bedroom (or in any case the place that was supposed to symbolize a bedroom), together with some of my companions, I was polishing my shoes, still dirty with mud, when suddenly one of them got up and came towards me, reaching down to pick up something that had fallen right next to my bed.
"I think this fell out of your pocket"
I got up thinking it was perhaps the belt strap that was now worn and worn out or some weapon that had simply fallen out of its lining; in reality it was a book, something that wasn't strange to find in my stuff but which stunned me, for the simple reason that it wasn't my book.
I took it, pretending it was my property and turned it over in my hands looking for some detail that could lead me to the rightful owner; the only problem is that it was the Divine Comedy, a book that everyone really knows and that could be found in every bookstore or library. It was a book that was really difficult for me to understand; I started to leaf through it and it was full of pencil marks; the owner had highlighted the phrases that attracted him most and highlighted them by underlining them. Whoever was reading it must have loved it very much, because every page was taken care of, well ironed and clean, even though you could see from the cover that it was a fairly old book. I spent most of the morning reading and consulting it, pausing every time I saw some underlining, around noon I finished caressing those pages, obviously I wasn't able to read it all, it was still a really long and heavy work which, if read, had to also be understood and appreciated.
My knees hurt from holding it on my lap and as much as that history and culture attracted me, my eyes needed a break, but before closing it I realized that on the last page just one single thing had been highlighted. phrase, contrary to all the others which were almost completely obscured by the signs: "The love that moves the sun and the other stars".
I lay in bed for a few moments, trying to rest before the afternoon training, but I couldn't sleep a wink; my mind was plagued by that sentence; whoever might be the owner of that book, without a doubt, had a big heart, a heart capable of loving, this was someone who didn't want war and more importantly, who didn't want to be involved, he was forced just like it was me and who knows how many kids were still like us. I began to imagine this person: was it a man or a woman? Maybe it belonged to one of the nurses who usually came to the camps to provide assistance, maybe to a private soldier of my faction, maybe it could even belong to some of my roommates, even if, to be honest, none of them would have ever had the strength or the willingness to read that book; thinking about it, however, it could also have belonged to one of the generals or even to one of the soldiers who died on the battlefield, perhaps that phrase was a dedication to the person he loved and who he knew he would never see again. My imagination began to show me images that, although the fruit of my thoughts, seemed terribly real: I visualized two eyes focused on the pages of that book, two hands holding it tightly while a smile bloomed on the face of the man or woman who was reading it. had purchased or who knows, had received as a gift from a loved one.
I would have remained in that position the whole time: lying down, with my eyes closed, with my mind full of happy and peaceful thoughts which, for once, for years now, dominated the noise of the bombs and the silence of death.