Against the Wind

To you, who tried to destroy me, to erase me, to reduce me to a shadow. To you, who, without meaning to, taught me the true value of life. Thank you. I was a tamed man, settled in his comforts, in the certainties built with effort, in the secure footholds that life had granted me. But I had lost the will to fight. I had surrendered to the ordinary, to the habit that kills dreams. I watched the world pass by with a sense of inadequacy, like someone who had stopped searching because he was convinced he would never find anything. Then you came, with your accomplices, with a malicious plan, full of venom and thirst for revenge. They applauded you in silence, they whispered to you in the dark, they opened the door to deception and closed the one to dialogue. You tore everything down. You took the certainties I had shared with you and scattered them to the wind. You forced me to look at myself in the mirror, naked, not to see my face, but my soul. Wounded. But still capable of rising again. I came very close to total destruction. And yet… I stopped just before, just one step, a few centimeters from the abyss that would have swallowed me forever. It was there, walking the ridge with uncertain steps, that I understood that I, without the struggle for something, without the desire to bend reality, to bend what is unjust, do not exist. I am that man. I am the stubborn will that refuses silence, I am the hand that digs, the voice that resists. And behind all the pain of loss, hope is hiding. The hope that I can make it, that I will not let everything bend me. The hope that I can react, even now, even at my age, when I never imagined I would have to face such a storm. The ability to pull something out, something of my own, something that belongs to me. The ability to oppose. To walk against the wind. To face life and its hardships with a sense of challenge. That had been missing in me. For too long. I was fading away. At first, I was afraid. Afraid I wouldn’t make it. Afraid I no longer had the strength to face the tide that was rising and dragging everything with it. I was truly afraid. But here I am. Still wounded, still uncertain, still aching. But ready to do the only thing I know how to do: fight. And fight on the right side. With the certainty that fighting on the right side is already a victory. To you, who, without meaning to, helped me find myself again.