Spirit

A few months passed since the terrible rescue, and finally I was about to see the end of that people accusing each other phase, typical, it seems, when you run into some embarrassing and almost fatal medical, legal or judicial mistake.

Not that it was really my intention to find a direct culprit to blame for what happened, but it seemed almost impossible to get rid of paperwork, statements, counter-declarations and rolls of bureaucracy that usually wrap who finds himself protagonist - or victim- of certain strange events.

Exactly everything you don't need in those kind of situations.

In any case, after that moment, signed the release paper from the hospital, an ominous calm occured.

The experts of the feelings gave so sophisticated interpretations about the meaning of the air vacuum that you feel after certain traumas, yet none of these seemed to fit in with the tumultuous apathy that captivated my husband nor with the deep anguish that grabbed my heart.

The more I bustled about filling our days of love, the more they emptied themselves of it.

The pained dull eyes of Noah did not react to any stimulus, as if, being been believed dead, he now felt obliged to ask permission to live. Almost as if, after his departure,

having all taken leave of him, it had been so inappropriate for him to decide to rise from the grave. So uncivil! So rude to force the good fellows into such a really uncomfortable position!

I wondered what kind of social life Lazarus had after the great fact, but, in my experience, a resurrected does not go well at all. It seemed that people were afraid of

attend him as if at dinner he would bring worms and soil. Everybody was always on the verge of turn up their nose as they would do in the presence of a carcass.

But their considerations were worse than I thought.

The apprehensive glances that they addressed to me almost made me doubt my mental health, so much so that for a considerable amount of time, I will not deny that, I used to try to notice if other people could see Noah.

In the meantime, his loneliness began to affect me as a disease.

***

I was walking in the street, reasoning between me and me. Those thoughts of mine were a huge shame for me, and at some point I had also stopped paying to confide them to a stranger, whose

work was nothing but to pick from his frigid freudian vocabulary some definitions to stick to me, as labels on the ham that you send to the butcher.

Here I felt: not understood, distorted, exposed.

Little by little, Noah himself also stopped to see doctors, tired of being told that there was nothing to worry about, and that the almost catatonic state in which he was poured was caused only by the profound shock.

The more he was hungry for deeper answers to the disturbing question hanging on his heart like a hook, the more and more he sought refuge in isolation.

He just desired to sleep, but the thought of a dream-less sleep, almost as an apparent death, was something that threw him back to the memory of the still fresh experience, the most terrible of all his life.

He then tried to daydream, knowing well how the imagination had the power to cure the spirit, but it seemed that the fertile land was nomore inside him.

And the more he noticed his inner dryness, the more this strange fever consumed him outwardly.

The attitude of the people around us certainly did not favor his recovery.

It seemed that for ordinary people it was much more likely that I had raised a dead man from beyond the grave rather than a necroscope doctor of a third order hospital making a mistake to check a box on a death certificate.

Ignorant.

Petty.

Cowards.

I went up into the house, full of anger, with the only desire to see him, to hold him in my arms, to love him, to protect him and

keep him safe from all the fools of this damn world.