Si chiude una porta, si apre un portone

Italy, night

I am not sure from where to start...My month is Italy is almost over, and I am trying to psychologically get ready to go back to France. I love living there, but it is never like being at home here in Italy where I grew up, where I can always be pampered by my mom (no comparison in having a flu alone in France, or here at my mom's place :-)), and where I have all my old time friends, the same since I was little. It feels like I can't fall, and even if I do fall, nothing bad is going to happen to me. It is comfortable, and this time I really recharged my batteries here. So, I guess going back home to France will be not easy, especially because the day after I will get there, I will have to leave again for Frankfurt....I would need to hide in my bed with a book to just get comfortable there again....But I will survive, as always, and I will get used to the different life style again. Not better, not worst, just different.

In Italy we say "quando si chiude una porta, si apre un portone", which translates to "when a door closes, a gate opens"......I am someone who doesn't care about the bigger door or gate that can open, if I like the small door that just closed. I never want to close a door. Every door that closes in my life, takes away a part of me. Closing doors can be a lot of different things, places where I have been living, apartments that I loved and had to leave, friends that I left in other countries, people who meant a lot to me who decided to follow their ways without me. It takes me very long time to cope with the changes.

Everyone who knows me thinks that because I travel all the time, because I have been living in so many different places, and started my life over so many times, I can easily adapt. But the older I get, the more attached I became to things, and I have always been very attached to the people who mean something in my life. So, when I have to leave or someone leaves me, it breaks my heart every time.

But I never had to experience what I experienced in the last months. Seeing someone who means immensely to me who not only decided to leave me and my life, but also slowly decided over the past months that there is nothing more worth to fight for, that there is nothing more to dream of, that there is nothing for which to smile again. This person broke my heart not only by deciding to leave my life, which at the end one way or the other I would accept for his happiness, but he did it much more by slowly destroying the person I adore so much and that he was.

The causes of his decision are too long to be explained here, and I understand the frustration and fear of having health problems and not being able to know what it is going on, after months spent seeing doctors and taking different analyses. I understand the anger, the feeling that life can be very unfair sometimes, the feeling of loneliness. I understand all this. And I understand that being far from him, I may not be the best person to support him, that my independent character is not ideal for someone who would need more attentions than if things were normal, I understand the reasons for desiring some distance from me, but what I can't stand and witness and breaks my heart is to see him falling into a deep dark hole every day more and more.
I never experienced the sense of impotence that I am experiencing now. I can listen to him, but I can't actually do anything, because he wouldn't listen to me, and he doesn't see a reason to react.

Every day when I wake up, I think of the person he was and I miss him. I miss his laughs and his smile. Because when I talk to him, all these wonderful things are replaced by sadness and lack of any hope for the present and the future. And it hurts me to see every day passing by without any improvement. I deal very very badly with other people's sufferance, especially if who is suffering is someone important to me. My first reaction is to escape, which I know doesn't help anyone, especially the person who is suffering and feels left alone. But after my first instinct, I force myself to try my best to be there, to offer my help.

I always thought that you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved, and in this case it is especially painful, because not only I feel that I don't help at all, no matter how much I try, but I also feel that he stopped to consider me as the person I am long time ago, seeing me now, depending on his mood, more as someone who could take him out of the place where is falling into or as someone who could have helped him, but decided to not do so. In both case, he makes me feel incredibly responsible of his situation, which I don't think it is fair to anyone. Furthermore, none else of the ones close to him can do anything at all, because he just doesn't listen to anyone. Again, maybe I am made in the wrong way, but I feel that I can help as much as I can if I see that he is fighting to get back in mental shape again.

Not really a topic for a week end, but it is now four months that I am living this, and it is four months that any single day I hope that it would be a better day for him, and I realized that I am living in a dream world, as I often do, and that the reality is different than my dreams.
However, when a friend of mine today, after seeing me getting every day more and more sad and worried for this person, told me as a joke (quite crappy I have to say) that maybe now that he left my life I can start to live again, I could only feel the loss and think of all the nice things I shared with him. Sometimes they are really the little things that make someone so special to me and to my life.