In the room where I spent my entire adolescence, I came across a diary where I used to write my thoughts during my first years of high school. I remembered it well, but I had never opened it again. Until that moment, I had never felt the need to reread it—as if what mattered wasn’t its contents, but simply knowing it was there.
From the very first line, the words on those pages felt both deeply familiar and strangely distant, slipping past my eyes in a single breath, like a landscape seen from a journey with no stops along the way.
Back then, going to school felt as beautiful as it was exhausting. It wasn’t easy to be constantly surrounded by dozens of people like me, yet so different from me, with barely a moment to catch my breath—between demanding teachers, tight schedules, and very early mornings. And yet, despite it all, the hallways of that school seemed full of possibility.
Reading those thoughts now, they first appeared like a land so far away it felt foreign. And yet, I realize I don’t lose my way along the paths those lines lead me through, because I recognize that place: it truly was me.
All at once, I vividly remember how difficult those years were for me. I remember a quiet unease that, without any clear reason, kept returning to visit me.
At times, I convinced myself that that pain was part of who I was—that it defined me, even justified me. I tried to wear it as if it were something useful, but I always found myself back at the beginning.
You know when the wind blows too hard and the flame of a candle seems to disappear? And yet, if you gently cup your hands around it to protect it, the flame rises again on its own: you couldn’t see it anymore, but it had never truly gone out.
When you think about it, it’s a matter of oxygen. Sometimes, it’s enough to strip everything away to discover that, late at night, by the light of a small candle, with a pen and a diary in your hands, that little flame is still there.
And thinking about it more deeply, perhaps everything can begin again from a single spark of courage.
Like choosing not to cover everything up with correction fluid, the way you do with mistakes, just to write over them with the “right” word—more convenient, more orderly. Boxed in.
Because within that disorder, there is a story.
No matter how small.
For example, in that one, there was mine.
And those tangled threads—I wouldn’t have given them to just anyone.
Along the way, I also met people who told me that, deep down, I was simply made that way—flawed, and therefore special. But you don’t always find the answers you’re looking for right away: the petals of a story slowly open in warm hands.
Returning, in my mind, to that room, after reading the final lines, I held the diary tightly and found myself thinking of Papillon.
I wondered whether there might be someone (not just a boy, but anyone) passing through here, carrying a dense fog in their mind or a heavy emptiness in their chest, not knowing where to begin to untangle themselves—feeling a little lost in this ever-faster world that seems to keep correcting you, erasing and rewriting.
I wonder if that person,
as they drift through all these bright, vivid, pulsing videos, articles, letters, illustrations, thoughts…
maybe late at night, by the light of a small light,
chooses
to begin again from their own little flame.
Adriana Ferretti
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