Libri & Dintorni di Raffaella Bonsignori

Don't you like New York in fall? For me she seems a beautiful, unwilling lady: sometimes she opens herself to a warm brightness, to a faint and graceful memory of summer tepidness, which grows longer, lies down on the Park, insinuates into the Streets, always cut by the sea scented wind which runs across the Avenues; other times she stages winter performances, she dresses herself up with clothes made of what newyorkers are going to expect in few days, that is icy wind and snow.
Well then, that was one of those typical days in which New York was foreseeing winter rigours. A troublesome, cold north wind, in fact, was blowing, creating dust, old newspapers and dead leaves huge whirls. Sky was overcast and dark. The thermometer was reading sixty eight degrees Farenhait.
However Kate seemed not to pay any attention neither to the climate, nor to the city changing all around. Recently her days were passing by without any hurry, without concentration, following the grey rhythm of the thoughts which crowded her mind; as if they were dusty and threadbare arrows, thrown into the sun by a crazy hand, they cut the light with their long, silent shadows.
That was a very difficult moment, for her; the worst of her whole life. Although she was convinced that it would have passed over soon. That's why she was silently, but confidently waiting for her clinical hurricane to go away. As soon as it would have gone, she would have picked the residual unbroken pieces of herself up and collect them together in the same way it is usually done to build a house: one brick on another, patiently, calmly, erecting impenetrable barrier walls.
Nevertheless, sometimes, not even walls can protect; Kate's ones, the walls of her own house, her den, her shell, hadn't been able to do that, for they let the anguish shiftlessly insinuate among the thin, vital air breaths hardly wafting through the windows; for they let the disinfectant stinky miasma of doctor's starched, white coat reek through the drains, incessantly renewing last months memories, when she began to shuttle from her office to the hospital: oncology ward.
Funny characters, doctors; definitively freaks, she was always thinking to herself. And after all she was definitively right.
Captured in their life and death constant reflections, in fact, they usually roam the aseptic corridors, where the whitened walls and floors should inspire a sense of cleanness, whereas evoke the disclosing of that light, which everyone who experienced pre-death episodes tells to have seen at the end of a huge, obscure tunnel.
I don't want to see that fucking light! she had been telling herself since the day her gynaecologist informed her about the absolute necessity of repeating the mammography.
She knew that it didn't mean she was sick, but thoughts fly fast when linked to anxiety.
Yes, she definitively disliked doctors. She had always hated, for example, their way of walking, hasty and lanky, as they would like to suggest hurry and, simultaneously, heedlessness of time; as they would like to communicate the uselessness of any attempt to stop them. They're always in a congenital haste and, more than this, they're never interested in what people need to ask them.
Do you want to know if you recover from your illness? they seem to ask. Well, I can't tell you; I'm not God, also if I like you to believe in it! and, then, they blow away, crossing corridors, wards, brushing against sick people, worried relatives, missing answers, reliefs, tears and smiles; they have their streets, their tracks already marked. No, they don't stop, they just keep on walking with their stethoscopes laying on the neck, exactly like unlaced ties in the style of suburb playboys out of a nightclub. After all, doctors are nothing more than little suburb playboys! They communicate diagnosis with an advertising smile and, suddenly, someone's life grows thinner:
"Well, we have to wait for the histological examination on your tissue. Only that we won't have the results before this afternoon"
"Right. And … in the meantime?"
"Keep calm"
"Calm, yes. Great advise!"
"I realize it's not simple, it could seem …"
" … an utopia! It's easy for you doctors to spend vain words; but, believe in me, you cannot even imagine the abyss of anguish opened by your most reassuring words"
The doctor said nothing, while his eyes were looking for any dot on his horizon that could keep him away from Kate's sad and dejected face; so he let fall down his idiot smile, learnt in all those psychology courses for medical doctors. There was no reason to carry on that absurd comedy, to set free from his words drenched with silly euphemisms and pitiful lies: he still didn't know the histological examination results on the tissue sample taken one week before by a fine-needle aspiration; and she didn't know if she had soon to die.
Late in the afternoon the riddle would have been solved somehow or other. She didn't have to do anything but wait. As soon as she left the hospital, she went to the office just to work on some files that were requiring her attention. Well … her attention … the attention was something she had lost weeks before and really wasn't able to guarantee to anything, just fancy to a couple of insurance files! Nevertheless, she forced herself to bring to an end her abeyance work. After all, if she hadn't gone to the office, she would have surely anticipated all those obsessive reflections, which were waiting for her at home, as usually happens every time someone wants to cure the anxiety in loneliness: obsessions, in fact, when set free, always transform themselves in an obscure, hardly tolerable chasm.
That's why space seemed to be infinite when she came back home: no rooms, but just many huge, endless nothings; a lot of nothings with their powerlessness, which have been exploding in her tormented and tired soul since the start of all that tragic comedy of life.
So, a jumble of many hours full of faded hopes and greedy doubts, welcomed her, that afternoon; trying to exorcise it, she took a shower and went to bed. She wanted to forget, but she chose the worst way of doing it. Rapidly shadows began to lie on the room and the light grew weaker, gliding on all the stuff around her, like a sadness veil.
A river of sensations, obscure like the night and deep like a starless sky, started to flow inside of her, before she could realize that she was attacked by panic and, slowly, she began to stifle. However, as anyone knows, terror usually grows up in the weakening of light. It seems that rumors of emptiness come to life in a directly proportional way with the opacity which covers the world.
She tried to be absent-minded, catching the sounds of the city, which, in spite of the double glasses, were entering through windows: the only living signs arriving in her life during that shady afternoon, laid under deadly reflections.
She heard coldness noisily lacerating the incipient evening and penetrating into her battered thoughts, simply patched together with her never pleasant, never agreeable dreams. The wind was vehemently howling and made windows tremble.
She reflected on what, sometimes, a simple, trifling breeze like that can become: a cyclone, a tornado, a hurricane …
Why on earth it has usually been given a female name to cyclones, when it's definitively easier for a male to lift up air from nothing? she asked to herself.
Her former boyfriend, for example, was a man -or, at least, that was what he was convinced to be-, proud of being a bearer of that masculinity to which he always attributed every kind of perfection:
"Also God is a male!" he loved to repeat.
What a stupid comment! She had said to herself ever since they left each other and she began that tragic travel through clinical researches. Also nightmare, stench, asshole are masculine words; also cancer is a masculine word and, as men usually do, it larks, silently waits and, then, it rebels and kills. What is the difference between a romance and a neoplastic growth, anyway?
A sense of rage and fury prevailed on dismalness. She thought over the previous months, when the romance with the man-proud-of-being-a-man had just been over. An end in keeping with all they had been living for the time they spent together, that is a liason characterized by endless denials, which had always made each decision a no-decision, each feeling a no-feeling, each common experience a no-experience.
Since they left each other, her friends have been keeping in telling her she was depressed, because of her bursting out in tears every now and then, closing herself in secrets days, introflexing not to die.
But she did know it wasn't depression: every time, for anger or pride, someone renounces to cry, he stocks up on tears, somehow or other, and tears always come out, sooner or later. She had cut them off too long. In the relationship with him, frustration had so annihilated her that she simply forgot how to cry. And then, finally ended that heart havoc, tears had arrived. At that point, she couldn't do anything to stop them: they had to pour from her eyes naturally. Sometimes a witty remark in a movie was the spring source of her tears, other times it was a glance cast at two strangers, whom were exchanging public warm demonstrations of affection. Besides, some other day also a room, her own room, by its shadows and glimmers of light, by its smells and inexplicable library shelves, was able to touch on subjects which would have been better to repress.
What she still didn't know was what a wrong love can do: it can lead a mind to melancholy, yes, but also a body towards illness!
She was completely dipped in those no-love soaked crying, which had been marking her heart with delusion and badness without solution of continuity. Everyone tried to help, giving her the advice to begin psychotherapy, or a cycle of Prozac, without being able, however, to reasonably support one or the other prospected solution. Psychotherapy or Prozac, that is the question! all those Hamlets seemed to repeat.
To sum up, no one knew what was really happening: the advices which her friends threw towards her were just attempts for not seeing her attacking entire chocolate boxes, for not knowing she was leading a secluded life, dipped into her house's obscure silence. That's all.
What they weren't able to understand was that neither psychotherapy, nor Prozac could work, for they were remedies which began with P and in her priority list there was room just for B. B for breast; B for baleful byend bubo hidden in there; B for bawl; B for biding the clinical examinations results; B for the bearish baldish blinking banal buffoon she met some time before in a party; B for the bombshell that their falling in love was, soon to turn into bedevilment and bad luck; B for baloneys he had always told her; B for the bad blood which filled her days with him 'til the end.
There was something disquieting in that letter, for her: roundish, apparently full of something, it seemed a breast, something she wouldn't like to think about. For the resemblance with breast, in the ancient runic futhark, she thought, it was the symbol of eternal feminine, of love. For her, on the contrary, it was the symbol of death.
What love are they talking about? B is the initial of his name, too. It can't be the symbol of love.
His name, yes: Bernard. Mr B. as she had been calling him since they were apart. She was convinced that using just the initial letter to indicate him would have been the perfect middle course between the name he had and the one he should have had, that is Bastard!
The hunger became unbearable.
She got up and went to the kitchen to cook a couple of eggs, dress the salad and warm up a slice of capsicum pizza, left-over from the previous evening. Then she uncorked a bottle of Italian wine and drank what she didn't eat.
The house was embraced by a dim light that was slowly turning into darkness. She didn't turn on the light, however: dimness was exactly what she needed. City lights entering the room through the windows were definitively enough. She looked at her beloved New York trying to find something she still didn't know, maybe an inspiration, or an answer, one of those answers which usually avoid to arrive when someone is anxiously waiting for them.
She felt good watching a city which was famous for being sleepless, that is famous for what she recently was, too. Shops were giving the idea of fervid activities to the curious eyes of passers by; cars were stuck in the chaotic city traffic, setting up a danse macabre of chassis sheets and crazy hooters; people seemed to proceed as if they were prayed by some unknown necessity, able to lead bodies towards strange lands far from minds. Like Zombies poisoned by an industrial quantity of cocaine, they were rooming any living space; they were expanding themselves in the surrounding air like gas; they were walking on sidewalk, crossing the streets, getting into shops, coming out from subways … everything without stopping not even for a while. Kate thought that, to look better at them, she could have seen the same persons passing by over and over again, every time with a different destination, as in a rule-game, the Game of the Busy Passer-by.
Where do they have to go? she wondered. Don't they know that everyone is going in the same place, at the end? she said to herself, reflecting on illness eventuality, cancer eventuality, death eventuality.
She poured other wine into the glass and sat down at her writing desk. She didn't have neither intention, nor desire to engage herself in some domestic activities such as putting back in order the papers piled up all over there, or writing down the list of bills to pay. Nothing whatsoever. She was just interested in moving her hands without a precious purpose. So she opened a drawer, that drawer at the bottom of any desk, typical of any house, full of knick-knacks and forgotten pieces of life. Under a box of dried up pens and unsharpened pencils, she found three letters linked by a pink silk ribbon.
"What the hell are these letters?" she asked aloud to the air.
She didn't remember to have ever carried on such an important correspondence to keep its vestige with a similar care. After all it wasn't her style!
"Pink silk ribbon? Until now, I was convinced they gave up selling it after nineteen century. Where did I ever take it?"
If her desk, instead of a modern, anonymous office table, had been an antique, she surely would have thought that those letters weren't hers, but of a former owner, as it usually happens in novels. In this case it would have been especially charming to read them. Of course, it wasn't less charming to read them knowing they were hers: for what she was able to remember, they were a newness anyway.
She turned on the light and untied the knot: on the develop her name and address. They were hers, beyond any doubt. The address was the one of her family's sea house at Hamptons; the house of her teen age, when summer holidays were spent with the whole family. That house hadn't been their summer destination for more than ten years: her parents were too aged to stay in New York, so they moved to Florida years before. Nasty climate for Kate, who loved icy weather, at least in winter time; that's why she hadn't been visiting them for more than one year. Whereas her brothers were both married: the eldest, George, moved to Seattle eight years before and the other, Henry, moved to Philadelphia a little later. They gave her five nephews, three of them were George's and the others were Henry's. She had never met them. She was a pc-aunt, for she used to see her family just by computer: photographs by emails and connections by web-cams.
She read the first letter.

Kate, my sweetheart,
here summer seems to be a long, eternal spring. There's a never ending shining sun, a never ending tepidness. Nevertheless I'm cold without you and I'd like it to be always night time, I'd like the darkness would continuously embrace me, because I want no sun on me, if you're not by my side. For me, the weather will never be sunny anymore.
So, my days sadly follow the course of my thoughts for you.
I just study; study hard, but with no inclination. I wish you were here. I'm sure that I would find my enthusiasm for studying, for learning and for living back.
Not even my stars are able to help me and there are many nights in which my telescope remains in the obscurity of the store-room, far from me as I'm far from it: two separated souls, exactly as me and you.
Since that our first night together, spent watching the firmament, the moon became nothing more than the far reflection of a soft chill stolen to the night. And I cry, my precious pearl, I'm not ashamed of talking about it. I cry my dying dreams.
Write me back soon, please.
I'm already waiting for you.
Absolutely yours.
Peter

A tide of memories pervaded her with its heavy weight of pleasure and pain.
A rent was suddenly opened in her time-line and she found her thoughts back, finally cleared of illness and full of far unfinished conversations.
It was a sweltering tedious July day in an ordinary shore, located in the middle of an ordinary memory, surfaced from the depth of the sea. The sultriness was unbearable and the sea, gently surging, was lapping a shore crammed by children boring flabby beside their sand castles. Further on there was an agglomerated of deck-chairs, deck-beds and beach umbrellas. An old man, who wore a worn out white jacket, was dragging his violin along, filling the air with his melancholic notes.
Tormenting and delicate, those notes stopped on their bodies, sliding under their sun-burnt skin, into their ears, their eyes, their smiles, their faces, which turned one to the other for stopping there, for a long, long while, letting them be dragged by the music and by an unknown and overbearing wave of sensation.
They were sixteen.
"Are you Kate Seymour; aren't you?"
"Yes, I'm. And you're Peter" she answered shyly, lowering her eyes.
"Exactly, I'm Peter. Peter Berry. We go at the same school"
"In fact" she replied, more and more gripped by the emotion that was clasping her throat in a vice-like grip.
God, how cute he is! she said to herself thinking to nothing but what her girlfriends would have certainly exclaimed when she would have talked to them about that meeting. Any girl, at school, was crazy about him, also if he apparently hadn't even noticed it. He was always absorbed in studying and, during that part of the evening that borders on the night, he loved to scrutinize the firmament by his telescope. He was great in astronomy. Nevertheless he didn't seem a no-appeal swat at all. Not a bit. He was also in the athletic team and was charming, really charming, as all girls used to say, languidly longing for him every time he was passing by.
"Will you spend your summer holidays here?" he asked with a voice lightly smothered by a clear trepidation, so that a hollow mixture of twisted vowel and consonants came out to form an incomprehensible grunt.
She didn't understand what he said, of course, so asked him to repeat.
"Will you stay here for summer holidays?" he said again, raising his voice.
"Yes. The whole summer. And you?"
"Idem. Whole summer"
"So we can see each other sometimes" hazarded Kate.
"With pleasure. Listen, tonight will be the plenilune. I own a telescope and, If you want, I can show you the moon"
"Sure!" she exclaimed enthusiastically, also if, a couple of seconds later, she thought to her parents, whom surely didn't allow her to go out after eight o'clock, and a dark veil passed over her eyes.
"What's up?" Peter asked sweetly, showing to have caught even the slightest change of her face, to care about her feelings, to dedicate to her with delicacy and empathy, synonymous of a valuable great generosity and shining soul.
"Nothing … I was just thinking that … maybe my parents …"
"I understand: they couldn't let you go out in the evening"
"I would remove the conditional tense. They surely won't let me go out after dinner time"
"Well, don't worry. If you want to watch the moon, I'll see that it will happen. Do you want to?"
"Of course" she answered, unable to cover that wave of enthusiasm, with which, since the beginning of their conversation, she had been signing her interest for him. "I mean … Yes, I'd like to, but I think it's really hard. Trust me"
"Let me see it. See you later, Kate" he said blowing a kiss to her an instant before to quickly disappear.
Kate was half shocked and half perplexed of his fast moving away. So, for the rest of the afternoon she couldn't refrain from thinking to him so intensely that any voice, any little distraction seemed an absurd intrusiveness in the blue and calm lake of her most intimate desires, which were slowly materializing. She pretended to read a book just to defend herself from any disturb, but she was able just to pretend. It was impossible, for her, to understand even a word: Peter was filling her thoughts completely.
It was six o'clock when she came back to the beach-umbrella under which her parents were sat down and she felt as a magic was crossing her street: she heard them talking about a faster return at home, that afternoon, because of the invitation for dinner they've just received from Mr and Mrs Berry, "the nice and elegant people who live in that huge villa at the bottom of the street" said her mother.
Peter kept the promise! That was all she succeeded in thinking about.
As soon as she came back home, she tried on all her dresses and some of her mother, too: she wanted to be beautiful. However, at the end of an exhausting fashion show in front of the mirror, she decided to wear her good-luck pair of jeans and her favorite t-shirt.
When they arrived to Berry's house, Peter was there to welcome her with a smile, which lighted her heart up.
"You've done it!" she whispered, hailing him.
"Sure. Any promise is a debt, especially if it is made to you"
His incisive and romantic words were still in the air when Peter went off like a gust of wind. Another time. Actually he reached Mrs Seymou in the living room: he saw her inadvertently left alone, for Mrs Berry suddenly disappeared (this must be a family feature, thought Kate) into the kitchen and her husband stayed in the garden with Kate's father smoking a cigar.
Kate saw him behaving like a perfect gentleman, accompanying her mother to the sofa, asking her what she would have enjoyed to drink, and calling the house-maid for the order.
In the meantime Mrs Berry reached them and Peter could come back to Kate, who was completely enraptured. He was her prince charming!
"I'm sorry" apologized Diamond Berry when she came back. "I wanted to ascertain everything was proceeding well with the dinner and I didn't realize to have left you alone. Actually I was sure John and Steve were following us here and not staying in the garden. Did Peter take care of you, at least? Did he offer you something to drink?"
"Yes he did, don't worry. My wine is coming and all is perfect" answered Sylvia Seymour.
"I'm always troubled when I receive guests: I'm a perfectionist and trying to be perfect I'm always making some mistake"
"Mistake?"
"I left you alone here. How do you call it?"
"I would call it spontaneous and warm welcome! I don't like too formal invitations"
"Well, if you like informal invitations, next time I will invite you in the kitchen with me!"
"To cook or just to see?"
"To cook, of course"
"I love not so informal invitations, after all! … I'm just kidding, of course. I would consider a privilege to strike up a so intense friendship with you to cook together"
"Welcome in my heart, darling. Next time barbecue in the garden!"
"Wonderful!"
They laugh heartily.
"Your son is really well-bred, Diamond. Congratulations" added Sylvia, sincerely admired by Peter's good manners.
"I do agree: it's a fortune to have a son like Peter. I admit it without false modesty, moreover because it isn't my credit or my husband's. He was born in this way: an English gentleman sorted out in an American family for a God's mistake!"
"Come on!"
"Trust me! Look, when he was a little kid he preferred to stay at home, playing chess and listening classic music with his grandfather, instead of playing with his friends. And John's father died when Peter was just ten"
"Well … Maybe a little bit precocious … "
"Besides, with his grandpa, he learnt to read at the age of four and he have been reading books since he was six. Then, at the age of eleven, astronomy became his greatest passion and, without giving all the other activities up, including hard athletics trainings, he gave body and soul to the stars"
"I think he embodies every mother's dream"
"I'm not saying no, of course. However … sometimes I'm very proud of him, but other times, I confess in a low voice, I'm bit worried and a little scared"
"I think you should be just proud. He's great"
"Yes I think so, too. And also Kate is. I've heard wonderful things about her: she is a very good student, intelligent, captured by philosophy, history, literature and she's a little champion in swimming, too"
"Too good" Sylvia answered quickly cutting short the speech, for her modesty always let her feel embarrassed when someone praised her or her family.
In that moment their husbands reached them and for the pleasure of Sylvia, the conversation changed, becoming fast and distracting: the perfect moment, for Kate and Peter, to stay alone, in the garden, watching the moon, and …
Peter took Kate's hand and leaded her to the telescope. Then, set up the lenses, found the right coordinates in an unreadable astral map, moved the telescope helped by the layer and showed the moon to Kate. It was an indescribable sensation, for her! She felt like she could touch it, for it was so near: she could see each crater.
"Wonderful indeed! But … it's like the moon is escaping from the shot. It's a shame!"
"It happens because of the planetary motion. The earth and the moon are both moving, so, for keeping on the observation, it's necessary to adjust the shot, moving the telescope. Come here: I'll try to keep the shot for you"
He framed the moon again and, staying behind Kate's shoulders to move the telescope, he let her loose herself in the sky one more time.
When Kate came back to earth, everything seemed to turn around her.
"It's simply fantastic!"
"I'm glad you've liked it"
While they were talking moon and stars were all around them, maybe inside of them. Kate felt a funny fire inflaming her; the same happened to Peter. Their hands lightly touched each other, their faces got closer and their lips … their lips were attracted each other so much that, shyly and delicately, a kiss rose between them. Their first kiss.
Other kisses followed in the eight weeks to come, of course.
However one day the darkness invaded their lighting world.
During one of the almost weekly dinners their families happily have been organizing for almost two months, Peter's father announced that he had just accepted a new job in S. Francisco and that the whole family would have moved there in a week.
Peter was shocked, simply knocked down; not Kate, apparently, for she granted the news with a frozen silence. She didn't believe in long-distance romances. It happened to Susan, her best friend: she tried to keep in contact, but, at the end, they left each other and it was more and more painful. So, she tried to convince herself and most of all Peter, it would have been better to make a clean break before leaving. Good memories: that's all they would have preserved of their romance. Actually, it was a comedy. She was destroyed by the news; she was feeling sad and miserable. But pride was her second name and, what's more, she was furious with Peter for not having tell her something about that transfer, she was sure he knew or he must have understood somehow or other; she was really angry with him for he didn't even try to convince his father to stay in New York. So, she succeeded in seeming indifferent, also if, at a certain point, a huge bawl was raising up her throat. She was hating herself for her weakness, but the dinner was ready and her mother called her to seat at the table.
A huge steak with french fries saved me from tears, she thought, sitting down on the farthest chair from Peter's one.
Nonetheless, was clear to everyone that, as Peter lost any light in his eyes, so did Kate.
During the following week they didn't succeeded in seeing each other: Kate was always very busy, or, at least, that was what she said every time Peter asked her to spend some time together. But, when the day of leaving arrived, their family met each other to say goodbye and Peter finally was in front of Kate. They were both sad. But if Peter vowed eternal love, Kate, on the contrary, thinking to her friend Susan, reacted closing herself to him: she was so disappointed and sad to become wicked. That's why she told him not to write or call her up, because she wouldn't have ever answered.
And it was exactly what she did, although during the first month Peter's letters arrived regularly.
Later on, when Peter realized that Kate would have kept the promise, never writing him back, he let the silence to fall down between them. Forever.
To Kate it seemed incredible to have remembered all those happenings with such a vivid vehemence and, more than this, it seemed definitively unusual to have kept the letters Peter wrote to her when he arrived in California.
She took the second one.

Dear Kate,
I keep dreaming of you every night and, every morning, I wake up in the soft sensation of having you here, near by me.
I'm surrounded by bitter restlessness, silent anguish; memories lost in the deep night that separates us from the real world, that world made of a nothing that was everything; that was the whole life; that was love.
A full moon and infinite shadows universe is locked in my heart: I make a lot of stories up, I loose myself in a book, I dream adventures followed towards an emotionally smile, your smile.
One century, one year, or, maybe, one day; just one day, yes, then I'll grow up in the sun, leaving our moon memories behind my shoulders, but until that moment let me still believe in us; let me hope; let me dream.
Where are you?
Please, tell me that you will reach me, also sending me just a letter to caress my heart.
I will never forget you.
Love.
Peter

She wondered how she could let the silence cover her first, young love; how she could renounce to such an elegant, pure, true, hopeful feeling. Maybe, she told herself, all the painful romances she lived since, the incomprehension she found in her relationships, men's infidelity or their superficial loveless way of living she suffered were nothing else than the scot to pay for having made a similar love die in the silence of distance, absence, separation.
She set about reading the last letter.

My dear Kate, always loved, never forgotten, forever mine,
I keep on hoping to receive a letter from you, also if I'm realizing that it will never happen. Your silence is rising up an icy wall between us; it's hard to pull it down.
My love for you is strong and infinite, but I can't go on writing while events are suggesting that my letters are not pleasant for you. That's why this will be my last letter, if you don't answer.
Please, don't think to my decision as a punishment. I'm just trying to respect your desires: I don't want my words to be a burden for you. That's all.
I'll keep on hoping, however; not even your silence can take the hope away from me. I'll keep on looking for a letter from you, a word, a sign that you're still thinking to me, a sign that I still exist for you, as you exist for me … inside of me.
Yesterday I had a long walk on the shore. I saw your eyes in the luminescent sky, your smile in the crystalline water; I saw your hands in the soft sunbeams. But, in that magnificent landscape, I saw some grey clouds, too, they had the same colour of your fears; I saw an inaccessible promontory, it reminded me your heart. And suddenly I was cold, really cold.
So, farewell, my love. Forever.
Always yours, Peter

When Kate put this letter into its develop, she realized to be streamed by tears and a deep sense of sweet regret seized her: full-bodied and oppressive, it pervaded her, filling her heart with the huge emptiness which is always left by some never-lived loves and by some heavy fears, able to cancel any beauty.
Immediately she switched on the computer and, connected to internet, she tipped his name on Google page and there he was!
So, she knew that he became a professor of Astronomy at Berkley University and that he was still living in S. Francisco with his family: a wife and two daughters of seven and three. There was also a photograph, shot some months before during the conferring of one of his many academic recognitions. He is still handsome, she thought.
At the first attempt she felt an absurd, unjustified jealousy; then she left free the deep love she had known with him that summer and she pleasantly realized that, after all those years and after their long, interminable silence, that love, that emotion linked to the first kiss, was in her heart yet, ready to nourish her with a so wonderful charge of positive energy to make her forget illness, cancer and any other cruelness life seemed to save up for her in those days.
She felt happy for him and even for herself and, in that her nasty clinic predicament, she learnt something she would have never forget: also if the diagnosis she was waiting for would have been cancer, she would have granted to die, in that moment, for she rediscovered the intensity and magic of those far emotions: something worth so much to outclass the natural conflict between life and death.
The telephone rang up.
"Mrs Seymour, good evening. I'm doctor Carrington"
"Yes" she answered, taking off any intonation from her monosyllable, as if her thoughts, still enraptured by that incredible turmoil of memories and emotions, hadn't exactly caught the meaning of his words.
"I'm glad to inform you that the histological examination is negative. You don't have cancer. It's a little benign cyst"
Silence.
"Mrs Seymour did you hear me?"
"Yes" a monosyllable again, this time forced in her throat by a wave of anxious joy.
"Mrs Seymour you're healthy. We can see each other one of next days for the hospital file delivery and for making an appointment to remove the cyst. In the meantime I wish you a good evening"
"Yes" she said for the third time. Aphasia had caught her completely. Nevertheless she tried to give out some other sounds. "Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm a bit confused"
"I understand"
"A good, wonderful evening to you, doctor"
"Thank you. Goodbye Mrs Seymour"
"Goodbye"
She hanged up the telephone, went to the desk, took a sheet of paper and began to write. There was someone who had to know she was fine.

My dear Peter,
after little less under fifteen years I write you the letter I should have written a long time ago.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure that this letter will never reach you: I won't mail it, actually. I think I'll rather stick it on the first page of that book on the moon you gave me before leaving, during that far summer at Hamptons, and I'll sell it to a S. Francisco used books seller. I think it's more consonant with all this funny and magic situation: if destiny, as it has impudently shown me today, is still able to be so fanciful and bizarre, maybe the book will arrive in your hands, sooner or later, and you'll read the letter.
There's just one thing I'm sure about: I have to tell you how this day has passed. It's something that only you can really understand, for your good relationship with the poetry of feelings beyond any distance and time, for your brave welcome of life "forevers".
Unusual day, today, peak of an infernal period made of medical doctors, conflicting diagnosis, checks, researches and, finally, a response, the definitive one; a response which was awaited all day long. What a day! Overwhelming, full of obsessive thoughts consumed in sleepless and anxiety.
Well, disappeared into this deep and dark ocean, as if by chance, this afternoon I opened a drawer and there I found you, in those three letters you wrote me at the end of the summer you moved to California; the summer of our love.
Suddenly, after years and years, you were in my hands, so little to frighten me and so big to charm me; big like your feelings, your courage, big like the generosity of your noble soul. I've always admired you, I've never stopped loving you. Now it seems all clear: I remember everything. When I received your letters I cried a lot. I was desperate without you, I was pining; but I knew that things wouldn't have been changed: you were living in S. Francisco, I was in New York. What could the future reserve to us? A long correspondence and, sooner or later, a broken heart and a new love. I thought it would have been better to preserve the memory of a wonderful love in our heart, not the image of a slow ending. It doesn't mean I've never loved you, or that I've easily forget you, also if I did forget you in time, of course. As you probably forgot me. That's life; although, reading you, a delicate wave of sweet promises ran over me: the memory of our summer reflected into your dark and deep eyes, huge, able to cross space and time, able to let us throw one in the arms of the other in a second on the sheets of paper to which you entrusted your feelings for me.
In your letters I found a piece of my life which I risked to loose forever in those last years of forgetfulness; I found a sunny corner in the tempest in which I spent my way of feeling after you.
So, following the fairy lights of past, a miracle happened: I gave up thinking to clinical examinations, to that infamous illness that is cancer; I gave up swimming in the anguish lake. On the contrary, I began to fly in that mysterious sky you've been scrutinizing all life long, the sky you taught me to discover that perfect summer, star after star, constellation after constellation.
By your letters I have rediscovered that emotion's intensity, which everyone is so lucky to feel should never, never forget. It occurs to me that Sinatra's song, It Was a Very Good Year, in which a man who is supposed to choose some days to live again. Well, if it could happen to me, among all "love days" I had in my life, I would choose our summer days. Maybe for you it's different. You probably have a lot of "love days" to choose to live again: your engagement, your marriage, the birth of your daughters. And this is how the story has to go. Maybe, to look better inside of me, I've other wonderful "love days", too; but today our memories have taken on great importance: their value can be seen by the persistence of beauty, goodness and magic our common feeling still carry with themselves. Do you want an evidence?
While I was thinking of us I received a call from the hospital, the one I was waiting for, the one I forgot to wait for, reading your letters. A doctor told me I wasn't sick and life began to flow in my days again, giving my future back. Surely the clinical examination results haven't been up to the magic of our far and always near love, but I owe our sweet memories my unexpected calm, deep consolation, sureness, clear acceptance of anything fate would have ever saved for me. And this is a miracle, trust me my far friend.
So, thank you my never lost love. Thank you for the first kiss we exchanged, thank you for having loved me, thank you for your letters and thank you for what you've just done.
Be happy. Forever.
Adieu, Kate