The heart found

We met Luna one January morning a year ago. She is numb, with chapped skin, lips and hands cut by the cold. She is very young and very beautiful. She sinks into the small armchair in the living room and, in a very colorful language, says that she is ill, she is sleeping in the cold emergency containers, in the midst of drug addicts and alcoholics and that she can't take it anymore, for over a month she hasn't had a shower.
She has a history of substance addiction, but she swears to be clean. The harshness of her language speaks of the difficult life she has lived, but something else emerges from her gaze: a longing for good that bursts inside her, but which she seems not to know the way out of her. Let's start this journey together: her gaze says much more than her words and we want her to be able to see that desire for good that she carries within her and that she asks to emerge.

Luna is 23 years old, abandoned as a little girl by her drug addict mother she grew up with her father, her new partner and the couple's daughter. She left her studies and left home, severing relations with everyone. With the passing of the months, the life of the Arsenale, its rhythms, its calm, the climate of respect and benevolence that you breathe slowly, creep into your life as a doubt: that next to so much rotten perhaps in life c is it also something good, clean? She begins to open up, to let herself be loved, to express the good that she feels, that she sees and perceives. On Easter night she, surprisingly, asks to participate in the vigil. She cries continuously for two hours, her heart is freed and the sky stops being empty, she returns to have a Father who is also a Father for her. Luna begins to believe in the possibility of resuming studying. She signs up for a cook's assistant course and social services, in July offer her a possibility of social housing for 18 months. In July of last year, before leaving, she left us a note: "Thank you for the infinite love you have given me. I feel like a different person, with a desire to live well and do things right. I never thought I'd go back to being a normal person again! School, home, peace of mind too. Over time you have become part of me. You have filled my lost heart in the past. You are special to me, people I will never want to disappoint. I will never stop loving you. P.S. Sorry I'm not so good at writing… ».


Simona Pagani
NP February 2022