MODICA – A.D. 1997. Messages from the past. When the you of the past comes to visit you. Words written when I was 17 years old under the stars and published in the school newspaper “L’Osservatorio del Galilei”, of the Liceo Scientifico Galileo Galilei of Modica (now Galilei-Campailla).
The text was written during a “Vigil to the Stars”. This is a moment of the scouting experience that is usually done on a camp evening after dinner: we gather, separate from each other and in great silence each one of us listens to himself, under the stars. When you experience all this at that age, your traveling companions become like brothers, and life, in time or space, will never be able to hide the memory of those moments lived together. Only from one of them, after 24 years, could the encounter with the me of that time return.
“I find it unfair to lower my gaze to write and leave millions of fireflies up there watching me.
The music of the sea, the fresh air, the moisture on my legs, the stars staring back at me.
This seascape lives inside me and seeing it again is like finding a love.
As I look at the stars I expect one to fall, but maybe I shouldn’t expect anything, because the more you expect something the less likely it is to arrive, and then the greatest joys are the unexpected ones, the ones that surprise.
Even if it doesn’t happen tonight I’m sure that the most beautiful star I’ll see will be when I look up by chance, and I’m sure I’ll be amazed.
My face doesn’t know how to stay still: it keeps living and looks up, hopes up, tends up.
I am experiencing my long-awaited solitude, my moment of calm and reflection.
I enter my world.
I see the sea, the beach. It is morning and evening.
I call each star with a wish.
I find myself.
I feel a charge to face my everyday life and to carry my burden no matter what.
The stars are my accomplices, they look at me, smile at me and keep talking to me. I let them and listen to their silence.
I like the idea that the sky changes from season to season. It changes, it’s always changing, and I try to get better and better. I lose myself in the fascination of glitter, and dream of infinity.
My world, I greet you from my sleeping bag, I marry the night, I imagine you and fantasize the future.
I dream even before falling asleep, I feel myself and listening to the beats of my heart I discover myself happy.
Alessia Scarso, 4/A“