Dear friend, we’ve been out of contact for a while, so I had the time I needed to think about myself.

A Letter to a Dear Friend, Written from Bosa

Do you remember when you told me we had to be together with ourself and be unhappy with what we didn’t have to be happy to live?

I’ve always thought of those words. Consider it a testimony of what I have thought of you over the years.

I’ve spent so much time trying to accept your sentence on life.

A friend of mine, last December took me to a surprising place, perhaps one of the quietest and loneliest places I’ve been in the previous 20 years.

The World has grown around this place over the centuries… but nothing has moved here.

Yes, some walls have changed colour, but the stones that make up the houses have been the same for centuries. People have been doing the same thing all the time.

People here born, lived and died in the same place.

Someone leaves, but then they come back.

This place creates a wound in your soul, like a sadness that you do not want to give up, because it is a pain too pleasant to live.

This places it seems that they all want things to remain the same. Accepting to live in unhappiness because they do not know what changes are, things that shatter, run, change, transform and disappear.

Last December, I looked at this place with surprise and photographed it to keep alive in my memory.

Last night I finally watched the pictures I did last year of this place.

The people there lived like in “lockdown” before we outside, in the World, used that word so frequently.

The chaos that I endured, how I lived for so long, which, in a way, burned me, ransacked me. I have to try to return to being myself, in these places and in that silence, amid those stones, comforted me and I felt reassured.

Maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic, it’s the World that it is, and the only real trap is to stick to everything.

That afternoon I realized that ruins are a gift.

Destruction is the way to transformation.

Even in this place, life has shown me that we must always be prepared for endless waves of transformations.

Dear friend, I understand that you and I deserve more in life than being friends just to say “Happy Christmas” or “Happy Birthday”, that doesn’t make sense.

Because otherwise, we are afraid of being annihilated by what surrounds us, while what surrounds us is part of ourselves.

The emptiness of these streets and the silence of these stones are us.

With the colour of these walls tend to protect us, did not separate us, but in fact, unite us.

Dear Friend I need to know you better, 20 years of separation as being very long and I try to forget you, but I realize I can’t.

I promise you that I will be more close to you from now.

---

The pictures above are from Bosa (©massimousaiphotographer).
Small town with less of 8,000 inhabitants. It’s a perfect place to learn about the fascinating old history of Sardegna.

---

If this letter to a dear friend spoke to you, you may enjoy more reflective essays on memory, distance and belonging over at Urban Mood Magazine. You can also read more about the quiet, colourful Sardinian town of Bosa, on the western coast of the island, that inspired these thoughts about time, roots, and the old friends we somehow carry with us across all the years.