I wasn’t told that respect and kindness were always fundamental human rights, not things you should earn with sweet actions, pillow talks and constant ego boosts — which deep down are just a strategy you found to postpone a next episode of aggression from them.

I ask myself how is it that we are surrounded by so much logic, rationale, and precision, yet all the same, overflown by an equivalent level of absurdly random occurrences. I ask myself why have I chosen a career that abides by science, data, and numbers, all of which give me close certainty (or great odds) on the final result if my spirit is drowning in the hypothesis that no scientific development can reassure me.

Words, I’ve always loved them. They uncover. They reveal. They expose. But they also hide, manipulate, and obstruct. They hinder the revealing silence that, more or less, communicates more than the lines that shape each letter, that form each word, that create each sentence.

In December 2020, after a year of ongoing pain during every single workout and sleepless nights, I found out that what I thought was a soreness that had to be overcome with the no pain, no gain mentality was a complex diagnosis that would change my life.

Mourning is more like an avalanche of snow that hits the surface of your being at this sudden, slow pace and piles up its remains at the bottom of the mountain, altering its shape, and forever changing its structure.