Unscripted love

48. What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

Can

Days, months, weeks and still this pain sticks to my gut.

I pay dearly for having tasted her lips again, her skin. Now I have to start all over again. Like a junkie who's been clean for weeks and has started using again for a fix...

I need to get away from this suffering that is suffocating me. For that, I don't know much else than travelling, going out, endless nights filled with chance encounters that blur the emptiness in my heart for an evening.

I know that no fleeting embrace will replace the absence, but it helps me forget for a moment. How long will I remain a shadow of my former self? Without desire, without motivation? I hope that one day I'll wake up and all this will be a bad memory, I try to persuade myself.

But every time I wake up, when my heavy eyelids try to acclimatise to the light of day, there is always this brief moment of oblivion, these few tiny seconds that it takes for the brain to reconnect with the reality of our life. A few moments of plenitude before the emptiness, the pain that insinuates itself into every pore to spread its venom of suffering.

Sport as a release, alcohol as an escape and the arms of a few girls to feel still alive...

Greece, Rome, Cannes, Madrid.

I move forward every day through a fog, as if I couldn't really see clearly, as if my overly flayed mind could only see straight ahead, without worrying about what's going on around it, on the sides. Because that would force me to look back, to lose myself in the corners of my life that I want to forget.

To feel nothing, no pain, no happiness, nothing.

In front of me, a goal, my career, the light at the end of this tunnel that seems endless.

As planned, in January, I honoured my patriotic commitments, donning my military clothes, joining my camp for a short month, abandoning the attributes that had defined me for months...my long hair.

This period, cold, deprived of my usual connections, of my bad habits, of my family, put my mind back in place. I couldn't go on living, lamenting and refusing to live.

With no tricks to mitigate them, my nightmares became more and more present and I would wake up in a sweat, gasping for breath, screaming in the middle of the dormitory the words I had internalised at the time of the drama. I had been devastated by the loss of our baby but at the time I was even more terrified of Demet's grief and the fear of losing her, of letting our relationship slip away. I had too much on my plate to allow myself to be unhappy. This child we could have had...and would soon be born...

I finally let my emotions out. Of course it was killing my heart, I had no appetite and it left me less time to recover from my endless days of training, but it was beneficial, a blessing in disguise, I had to get rid of it.

I rediscovered the calm of a true inner solitude. I found myself wanting to read, to listen to music other than just for background music. In short, I let my mind soak up emotions, life.

And yet, every day my first thoughts were still of her. Under my eyelids the glow of her irises.

And every night when sleep took me away I felt as if her scent was floating somewhere around me.

In the weeks following my return from the army, I kept a low profile.

I got closer to my best friends, found the atmosphere of the law firm with them and took time to share it with my most precious ones, my father and my mother.

No more nights out, no more social networking. I gave myself an Italian getaway (commitments made in advance) to Milan and returned in extremis to confine myself.