L'Aquila

An earsplitting rumble rips through my dreams shaking the world as I know it to its death. Then all is still. 

I wake up in a terrible sweat and look around me in the dark. I can't remember where I am. My nightlight is on the wrong side of the bed and as I grasp for it with the light comes understanding. This is not my home, but the house where I now live. 

I walk barefoot to the window and there I see my home hurt and bleeding just metres away. It stands hauntingly in the night sky. The crescent moon, like a broken spotlight, hits the crooked door and the crooked roof and the blind windows. 

I count the numerous scars in the facade. There is no more life there. It went with the earthquake. It disappeared in one deafening moment. It took all I had away and left me old and withered, older than my years, but not old enough.

I pull on a pair of trousers and a shirt. I lace up my shoes and escape outside to safety. Outside the world is safe. If we had all been outside we would have been safe, and I would not stand alone now.

Along the road other little wooden houses stand, like mine. A row of precarious lives. My neighbours and I. 

We are no longer whole. We have lost our pasts and have insecure futures. We walk like automatons through a life we no longer recognize searching the faces of the passers-by for old friends and  companions. On lonely afternoons we walk silently through the streets of L'Aquila looking for a change that is yet to come. We caress the wooden frames that sustain lanes that no-one takes, and doors that no-one enters. Our steps along the cobbled streets that were once bustling with life sound out the days that have marked our present lives. We search the surrounding mountains for the snows that are soon sure to come and wonder at how life in those mountains, our mountains, moves on so evenly, unaltered, unharmed, and unknowing.

I walk to the house that I once occupied with the people I love. I kick a fallen brick. Blood red among the chalky plaster. Through the gaping wounds I am able to glimpse traces of my past. If I listen carefully, I can hear the voices of the ones I love as they moved through their lives unaware of the oncoming disaster. If I look closely, I can see the colours of a life I will never have again. I sit on a broken chair and wait for daylight to come. I sit very still, as close to my old home as I can. I am aware that any sudden movement from the depths of the earth would bury me under the rubble, but I am not afraid. 

I have nothing more to lose.

Matilde Colarossi