REESE

chapter thirty four.

Reese POV:

Our memory serves as the basis of our attachment.

It defines the very structure of our identity by associating everything we deem as good to specific reminders and instances. The comfort we feel around specific people, the joy that comes from doing activities we love, the excitement that conjures up when placed in a familiar scenario that we know will only serve to bring us pleasure, all instances where memory and attachment go hand in hand. Without memory there is no desire to love, there is no importance in maintaining connections, and there is no yearning to repeat things that make us feel euphoric, exhilarated, and happy. Without memory, attachment wouldn't exist.

I had a traitorous attachment to Italy.

That very attachment had been the bane of my existence for the past ten years. The longer I ignored it, the more heavily it weighed down on my heart. It was something I just couldn't adequately explain to anyone. How does one justify mourning their presence in a country that houses the people that failed them? How does one justify longing to revisit the same place that generated unforeseeable amounts of anguish and slammed that suffering into a mere child?

My answer was simple. It wasn't so much the place I always tended to miss, it was more so the person that I had left behind.

They say home is where the heart is, and make no mistake my heart was embedded into the very structure of New York but a piece of my soul would always reside in Italy. That piece was lowered into the ground the exact moment I stood helplessly and watched as my mother entered her final resting place. Little did I know, I would enter a grave of my own that day. The end of my mother's life and the end of my childhood placed us both into coffins, the only difference was that I seemed to have been buried alive. The grave I was trapped in was suffocating, painful, it was the embodiment of my very own personal hell, but I could only hope the one my mother was placed in was different.

It's funny how love seems to work. In cases of unconditional love, anxiety is undeterred by life and by death. You worry about your loved ones when they are right in front of you and when they're gone. Personally, the only way I could alleviate my growing anxiety was to visit and speak to my mom everyday just to assure myself that she was fine. Her burial ground became my sanctuary, I didn't need her to reciprocate my words, I just needed to feel her presence. I wanted, no needed, to feel like there was someone sitting in my corner, someone who loved me. My mother was the sole reason I survived those agonizing two years, her memory saved my life when previous attachments betrayed me.

I was completely and utterly reliant on the idea that my mom was listening to me every time I sat in front of her grave, but that hope was subject to the fact that I could go visit her anytime I pleased. I had that luxury, until the day I ran. I had run through every possibility, every scenario of what could go wrong in my mind before I ran from Italy but somehow for the first time in years, the remembrance of my mother slipped through my mind. I never took into account the actual number of people I was leaving behind. I ran away and the Di Genova cemetery just so happened to stay under the guard and protection of the very four people I was running from.

I couldn't visit my mom without exposing my whereabouts, so I didn't.

I haven't visited my mom in ten years. I abandoned her, I left her behind, and a selfish part of me wonders if she deserved it. After all, she did it to me first.

Let me tell you what goes through a six-year-old's mind when she loses everything. She begins by going back to August 11, 2003, the day she was born. She was held by her father who picked her up as if she was the most delicate thing he had ever touched. He looked her right in the eyes and promised that he wasn't going to let anything harm her. He promised that he was going to be the best father for her, the best friend, the best protector. He promised her the world, but he ended up not being in hers long enough for her to make sense of his unfulfilled words.