For the fifth time this week, the morning sky is grey when I wake up. Strange, given that this time of the year, in mid-June, the brightness of Italian summers should kick in.
My hand shakes as I smoke a cigarette on my balcony, looking down at the quiet city. I’m nervous. I mean, as an over-thinker, I always am to some degree. But, more than on other days, today I feel like my heart could actually bust out of my rib cage.
Though, it’s only normal that I should feel like this. After all, today’stheday. The day Sergio, Mario and I would execute the plan: we would burn down the migrant camp.
I wasn’t looking at anything in particular — I was only admiring my surroundings, while chewing the roasted meat — when I saw him.
He was sitting on one of the benches opposite the pub. He didn’t look threatening at all — a flimsy dark shirt, probably linen, and some dark jeans. But his stare, aiming straight at me, quickly unsettled me.
Therapy was never an option for me. Therapy was a thing only meant for insane people, I always thought.
‘I’m completely fine,’ I would often say to myself about my mental stability, when contemplating about a thing I may have done which could be deemed a bit crazy.
But I stopped saying this the day I grabbed the knife, looking to defend myself with it, only to find air waiting for me.
‘To be a judge is easy,’ Judge Collins would say to students, when invited to speak at university conferences. ‘The golden rule is: you must be impassive. You must keep all emotions out of your job.’ He firmly believed this. Heck, it had been his modus operandi throughout his career.
How could he know that his beliefs would change radically, that he would be so rocked to his core by death that his golden rule would feel impossible to follow?
The lie was never an issue for me. I mean, I was fine with spending the rest of my life behind bars, as though the real culprit of the crime of June, 1997. And the thought of breaking silence about my innocence would have never crossed my mind, had I not received her letter this morning.
