Sometimes I belong to what's not mine

  • Chiara Toso

Not so far from my parents' house there's a path that leads to a long blind alley in the middle of farmlands; I don't know why I had never paid attention to that part of my village, even if it was so close to home. Walking down that path, at 18, I discovered a solitary, abandoned small house: the doorbell had my last name written on. Nor me or my relatives where connected to the former owner. It's been ten years now from that casual discovery. I changed a lot, and that house did too. I moved away from home, knew a lot about the world and myself. In my teenage years I always had this feeling of not belonging: to my sorroundings, to my then friends, to the average circle of life of a small town; I felt what's pretty common at that age, not to be understood, at all. I wanted freedom, no judgement, to experiment with life. That's why I left, and I hated getting back to my village, when I had to. I always felt that my family was trying to silently make me fit back to the original scheme. Neverthless, somehow, every time I got back to see that house again, I felt home. That building and its sorroundings were changing while I was not there, and even, I kept seeing myself mirrored in them. In the last few years, those feelings of being a stranger in my hometown started becoming something else. I felt a weird kind of nostalgia of its landscape, the kind of nostalgia you feel when you know you don't want to get back to that place, but you need to recall it in your thoughts to find yourself again. Last time I saw that house, I discovered it had burnt down. It was really a long time I hadn't see it. I stood there quietly shocked. I cried a bit. But I felt that kind of sensation, when you finally understand that the biggest enemy you were trying to fight had always been inside yourself. In some way, I felt freed. Eventually, I learned how to embrace my boundaries.