Deep down, we all remain a bit like children,
when every story ended with: “And they lived happily ever after.”
Then we grow up, and discover that happy endings are rare.
That love can break.
That someone who once loved you can turn away and leave.
That a child can drift away from you
without even understanding why.
But I want to tell you a story with a happy ending.
I don’t know if it really happened,
or if I just dreamed it
during one of those long nights
when pain mixes with hope
and you can no longer tell memory from prayer.
It was a story that seemed bound to end badly.
A man alone, a father,
who no longer saw his son.
He could only glimpse him from afar, in some blurred photo.
His voice had become silence.
His touch, a fading memory.
He had not been a violent father,
but an imperfect one, yes.
He had chosen to leave
when the relationship with his wife had become a tired labyrinth.
He had paid child support.
He had tried, at first, to remain present.
Then the distance, the fatigue, the shame
had pushed him to the margins of his own life.
And he no longer found the strength to return.
The son, meanwhile, had grown.
He had learned to live without.
The mother was strong, present.
And around him, many peers like him:
distant fathers, alternate weekends, silent phones.
No one had ever asked where his father was.
And he had never needed to answer.
The encounter happened by chance.
At a traffic light, in an ordinary neighborhood.
The father saw him immediately, that boy.
Tall, thin, his face more adult than he remembered.
He was alone, with a backpack and headphones.
His heart tightened.
He didn’t know whether to speak, to smile,
or pretend not to see him.
Then it happened.
The boy turned around.
And their eyes met.
It was just a look.
A moment of suspension
in which both recognized something:
a bond that had never truly died.
A void that could perhaps still be filled, somehow.
It was a moment of revelation.
One of those moments life offers only once,
if it offers them at all.
In that look, there were no more accusations, no defenses.
The blame, the mistakes, the responsibilities —
melted like snow in the sun of what truly matters.
They stood bare before themselves.
No roles, no excuses.
Just a father and a son,
stripped of all distance,
united by what they had lost
and by what — perhaps — they could still recover.
In that look,
the father saw his past.
Everything he had failed to be,
and that was now returned to him, mercifully.
The son, instead, saw his future.
A new possibility,
a bridge where once there had only been emptiness.
And from that moment on,
without saying a word,
his life was no longer the same.
This is my story.
I tell it as I remember it.
Or as I dreamed it.
I couldn't say if it really happened.
I never found the courage to look for him,
to write to him,
to ask: “That day... did you see me too?”
Maybe it really was him,
maybe it was just a similar face,
maybe it was only my heart that, for once,
didn’t want to listen to reason.
It doesn’t matter.
Because from that moment on —
real or imagined —
I began to live again.
And even if it was just a dream,
then blessed be that night,
that granted me the grace
of a look worth a lifetime.
And yet, when I woke up —
if I truly had been dreaming —
I felt something different in my chest.
A lightness.
As if ten years of regret and guilt
had flown away,
even if only for a moment.
Not because things had changed.
Not because everything had been repaired.
But because, for a moment,
I felt that I still existed
in the life of my son.
And that, for a father,
is worth more than any word.