I looked outside, the sun was rising with no time to restrain it, and it warmed my skin — but also inside, somewhere, something was coming out of an inertia of time. I don’t know. Easy to say it was from childhood, but it was adolescence. From before. From the touch, the air we breathed, the gaze, the affection that brushes hair away from the eyes. That sun I saw through the glass warmed much more than the body—it brought me back to this old, worn, ancient place with peeling walls like neglected skin, repeating every summer, revealing to the caterpillar a new world not yet seen but felt throughout an entire life.

And man… the bed, the smell, the light. It’s so much light that it blinds you, and there is despair, and in the reaction, we try to make sense by putting things we knew into this new environment and… it doesn’t work. You have to learn to unlearn, and carry it as if it’s all new. With a little fear to survive—but not the kind that paralyses. With courage.

There, naked, for the first time, I felt what I always said I was: Brazilian, with Italian blood, who drinks chimarrão. But I kept quiet. I had no one to talk to. It was just me, the other me, and my demons, who were in that same place the sun was warming up. And they were keen.

It was the beginning of the end. I’m living the end.
So

I miss your touch, walking barefoot and feeling the coolness of wet grass—free. Having the courage to explore this beautiful world one more time without you, and to love the people I’ve met on my own again, from outside myself now, so they can pull me in - without fear of saying mi manca questo. I’m not strong. I’m soft inside this tough eggshell, and I don’t know why it’s hard to admit, but I miss the ground, beans, the space filled in the bed. You. Being weak.

I miss missing.

The sun.