One day, GS woke up with a strange feeling. Nothing specific, nothing painful. Just an absence. Something that used to be there — and now wasn’t.
He thought it might have been a restless night, or too heavy a dinner. He got up — or at least he thought he did. He tried to straighten the bed, but the sheets didn’t move.
Disturbed, he walked to the bathroom. He stepped in front of the mirror. Nothing. The mirror reflected the wall behind him, but not his face. Not his body. Not him.
He began to scream. He called his wife. He called his children — Enrico, Ettore, Eleonora. But no one heard him.
The children were there. GS tried to touch them, kiss them, hug them. No reaction. No shiver. No gaze. He had become invisible. Even to them.
And then GS understood the truth. It wasn’t a nightmare. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. He had been condemned to invisibility. A sentence without trial. A punishment without appeal. The punishment for having loved too much. It was the most brutal one. Worse than death. Because the dead, at least, are remembered. The invisible are forgotten while still alive.
And in that silent condemnation, GS had to keep existing. To see. To hear. But no longer to be.
Then, the doorbell rang. Enrico ran to open it. Two women, whom only the mother seemed to know, entered. They sat down and began to speak.
– “Your dad… he’s gone.”
– “He wasn’t the right man for you.”
– “Now you’re safe.”
GS screamed. No one heard. He wanted to fight. But reality was stronger than truth. And he was outside both.
Evening came. GS had an intuition. “I’ll write. I’ll write everywhere — on the walls, on the roads. I’ll tell my story.” He grabbed a pen. He wrote on a sheet: “I am the father you no longer see. I didn’t leave. They erased me.”
After a few seconds, the words disappeared. The page turned white again. He tried again. Another sentence. Another sheet. But nothing remained. No word survived his hand.
He decided to leave. “I’ll go where they once knew me. Where my name meant something.” But even there, among old friends, among familiar faces, no one saw him. No one recognized him. No one remembered him.
And so, alone, one night, GS climbed a bridge. He looked at the dark river. He thought: “At least this I can do. At least I can disappear completely.”
And he jumped. But he didn’t fall. He no longer had weight. He no longer had a body. Even death was denied him.
Then he began to rise. To float. Beyond the city. Beyond the lights. To the sky. He found a cloud. He sat on it. He discovered that by brushing it, he could change its shape.
At first it was a game. Then an idea. Then a new voice. He tried to draw letters. Then words. And he succeeded.
He wrote: “D A D I S H E R E.”
He did it without asking anything. He did it to leave a mark. He did it because no invisibility is absolute when there’s still love to give.
Maybe one day Enrico will look up and pause. Maybe Ettore will smile without knowing why. Maybe Eleonora will say: “Look at that cloud… it feels like it’s speaking to us.”
And even if no one knows who it was, someone will know it was love.
A tale for those who have known silence. For those who weren’t seen. For those who, even invisible, kept on loving.