Not everything was loud as in the past… but silent in a deadly way.
I became cold… I no longer scream, no longer long, no longer rejoice as I once did. I laughed in people's faces, and froze inside. I ate food, went to work, raised my children… but I resembled another shadow. No warmth in my soul, no tremor in my heart.
My dreams… as if they had faded. They did not disappear all at once, but melted slowly… like a small candle in a damp room. And whenever I came close to a dream, I felt it moving away… as if it was taking revenge on me for believing it was possible.
Even the shadow… changed. He no longer only terrified me, but began to reproach me. He came closer, sat beside me, as if saying: "Look at me… do not run away. I am you… the part you buried."
People said to me: "You are envied. You have the evil eye. Your life stopped after you were successful."
But I had not reached the peak… I was stumbling. As if I were drowning in mud, stretching out my hands and no one held them. I used to say: "This is my destiny, God wrote this for me."
Then, in moments of collapse, I screamed inside: "No! They are the reason… their looks, their words, their heavy hands on my back, they all pushed me into this extinction."
Today… I live between two: a shadow that does not leave, and me, who does not move forward.
I try to know who I am…
Am I the one who loved the sea… or the one who feared the darkness?
Am I the one who wanted to save people… or the one who has not yet saved herself?
The Conclusion
Me… and the shadow.
We were not enemies as I once thought, nor friends as I wished.
He was a mirror of my sorrow, an echo of my unfinished childhood, a voice of my unhealed wound.
Today, as I write my final words, I realize that the shadow never lived in the room, nor in the walls, nor even in the sea…
He lived within me.
But I am no longer the little girl who cries at night.
I am a woman who knows there is darkness inside her, yet chooses to search for the light.
A woman not defeated by exile, nor by fear, nor by the eyes that condemned her to extinction.
I will go on, with my shadow—
not as a chain that haunts me, but as a memory reminding me that I survived.
For I was not created to be a shadow…
I was created to be life.