Heart corners

We are not loved because we are good, we are good because we are loved

A child tells the teacher that he misses him when he was in hospital, because yes, «it was a bit boring, but there were always those who asked me if I was okay. I had a bed all to myself, we always ate at the same time and I could even choose what to eat. Not like home. Where I open the fridge when I'm hungry hoping to find something, in the evening I pray that my brothers haven't already taken all the blankets and tomorrow who knows if there will be a more or less clean shirt in my size to wear, otherwise they'll take me everyone around again. It's almost lucky that mum didn't give me all the medicine and I ended up here."

The Arsenale della Pace welcomes every day the children and young people who live around it like him, in a popular and multi-ethnic neighbourhood. They come running in, throw their backpack in the wrong place and run out at the speed of light to do the only thing that really matters: play. At home they are used to doing it in a closet. We all come from another place, we like them, and when something doesn't go as we would like, a phrase by Dom Luciano Mendes de Almeida always comes to mind: «We are not loved because we are good, we are good because we are loved». He reminds me where the lack is. Never in the child or boy in front of me.

It is the absence of love written in the story of her little life: it is brought by the little girl abandoned by a father whose name and face she will never know, who was born more over there than here months earlier than expected by a drug-addicted mother, the girl who will forever bear the marks of the boiling water that burned her skin. The episodes of mistreatment, abandonment, violence that they have suffered or witnessed, disturb their peace: crises, crying, blocks, the lack of an emotional balance that allows them to accept even the smallest frustration. They live in a constant desperate search for recognition and confirmation to feel they are still alive. They see the people they loved most disappear from one day to the next and never return, there are voices and glances that reach them only through a smartphone because they are inside a prison, they live in a house that smells of mold counting the days from next eviction notice, which they read to an illiterate mother, even more scared than them. Immersed in a condition of insecurity and danger, every morning they breathe the air of a new day, they wake up feeling strong, convinced that they will make it.

When they least want it, it's as if the ghosts they thought they had safely locked away in a corner of their heart suddenly come out, making that huge mess again. Once again losing control and bursting into tears in front of everyone, the ghosts that come out of that corner of your heart rule and the people around you are as if they no longer exist.

Then the shame sets in and you hide under a hood without even knowing why it happened again.

Then even a hospital, the place where you go when you're sick, where they took you in an ambulance because you couldn't get out of bed, becomes the place where someone takes care of you. The same thing happens to the boy who lived upstairs, tired of so many broken promises, that he thinks it is better to stay in a juvenile prison than to go out and burn with pain for the disappointment of a new illusion, because there is no path to happiness. , it's all punishment and survival.

Then you get here. You run to play and we look down on you with the luck of a normal life, we're fine and you're late, we're dressed well and you're full of tears and stains, we're right and you're wrong, we're at home and you're inappropriate guests. We think about the right punishment for that very inadequate behavior, until we remember that we are not loved because we are good, we are good because we are loved.

Maybe opening your heart is better than raising your voice. At the bottom of your backpack is the medicine they gave you when you left that beautiful place. You read the package leaflet yourself to find out when you should take it. You fold it and make a paper plane on which you can fly your thoughts.

There is another corner on the other side of the heart where your desire for the right to hope for a beautiful life still remains intact. We meet there, in that corner of the heart where everything is still possible, the one where there are no ghosts, you with a life to live and us with the promise of a greater love to keep.

Marco Grossetti

NP Dicembre 2023