Book Title: Me and the Shadow
To that little girl who is still searching for a hug…
A writer narrates her inner voice through shadow, memory, and estrangement...
Inspired by a true story about the journey of a little girl into adulthood.
Chapter One: The Girl and the Shadow
Since I became aware, I was never alone. There was always someone accompanying me… no body, no name, but he never left me.
I was a child who did not remember much playing, and did not carry in her heart laughing images of childhood. All I knew… that I was not like others.
Poverty surrounded me, and the sea was my only window. I loved its rage, its smell, its sound when it hit the rock. I used to escape to it from the silence of the house, from the whispers of women who divided me by color between the beautiful ones… and the marginalized dark-skinned girl.
I was dark-skinned, yes. Calm, silent, deep. And everyone saw me as "ordinary"… but something inside me was not like that.
At the age of six… the story began. A summer night, heavy, as if it was hiding something in its chest. I was sleeping with my siblings, and suddenly I felt something… unseen, but I felt it, it pulled me from my bed while I was sleeping. It was not a dream, I saw a shadow moving me toward the kitchen, with no face… only a strange feeling that cannot be explained.
In the morning, I said to my mother: "There was someone who pulled me while I was sleeping." She stopped, looked at me in astonishment, then with a long silence… she said something vague, neither belief, nor denial.
And the days passed. And when I grew up, I asked her: "Do you remember the day I told you that someone pulled me when I was little?" She said: "I forgot."
But I did not forget. That was the first shadow… and after it, I never slept like children sleep.
Before marriage, I did not see it, but I used to feel it. It came to me like a sudden shiver, like a heavy silence entering the room, then freezing me in my place. Sometimes I feel the air change, that something is hovering around me, watching me. I was afraid to turn, to be sure.
But after marriage… everything changed. It was no longer just a feeling. It became a form. The shadow of a man. I never saw his face, only from his shoulders to his feet. A figure standing, sometimes at the door, sometimes behind me.
I was afraid to look at him, to see him fully. In his presence there was something like absence, and in his absence something like fear. And I… was between the two. I saw him and I did not see him. I trembled… and I did not scream.
…to be continued.