Another moon, innocent and desperate, has risen over the Strait. It climbs above the clouds lying over the two coasts, a sickle pointing between shores that seem to touch, and there will spend the night, talking with the tides, until the first morning star deposes it.
Two cities once rose beneath it, Messina and Reggio Calabria, but little remains today of their faded glory. On calm evenings, specters of the ancient inhabitants chase one another from shore to shore, descend from the Hills of Neptune and escape to the flat land or dive into the sea that has betrayed them. The water with its shadows, myths, and monsters remains indifferent to their raging, but the voices will torment my sleep until the sirocco returns to silence them; then, perhaps, I’ll find some peace. With every new moon I bury my ghosts, but they return, alive and troubling, depending on the winds, on the ephemeris, and on small variations that I alone notice.
I’ve spent all the nights of my life on this shore, and I know every trick of my false horizon: the eyes of those born beside the sea get lost in the infinite, but my sea is different; it pushes you back like a mirror. The wall of another coast blocked my gaze at birth: maybe that’s why I’ve never left, even when the water abused and deceived me, violated my youth and destroyed who I was.
As a girl, I imagined a boy who lived in the city opposite, looking out a window like mine, a solitary boy shut up in a cage like me. His story, mine, and the story of this place are bound together under the water and under the earth, cards from the tarot deck that the wind has jumbled in the dark. Those stories can only be told together.
Out there before us, in the darkest corner of Calabria, where nothing exists any longer, was what eleven years ago he called home.