Today my sister left for Spain.
She works there for the summer season and has returned to Spain to spend the winter.
In greeting her, I thought back to this time spent with her and I discovered that I have only re-known her now.
From an early age we had a wonderful and special relationship.
We were inseparable, we really loved each other in a fraternal love in no uncertain terms.
We both had difficulties in family life and each of us reacted differently.
After school, her choice of life took her abroad and we have seen and heard very little since then.
This is how I began to see her as a distant sister.
Lost in a world that is too different that it couldn't coincide with mine.
In my mind she was no longer the person I had known.
But a person with behaviors, interests and priorities quite far from what I could have shared.
Answers to that difficult childhood that we both felt in the grip of and from which we sought to escape in completely different ways.
However united still in memory of her now only the figure remained that I felt I would never find again.
As soon as I arrived I thought I was not wrong.
Really the sister I saw it no longer coincided with the one I gratefully carried in my memories and I admit a hint of disappointment.
I felt scared in confirming that change.
But what was I really looking at?
Love never ends
She likes to say that she has many modalities that she chooses according to the situation.
Like in a video game (we liked Supermario!) In which you choose the character according to who you want to be at that moment and the scene you want to enter.
Turtle, Super Mario or Coon? ?
Whenever she feels vulnerable, whenever something could hurt her, whenever she's afraid she gets into the most suitable character.
Real modalities.
The good girl soap and water, the classy citizen, the mountaineer, the transgressive, the responsible and caring adult daughter.
Some time ago I did not recognize her and I saw a changing person whom I did not appreciate very much and who I did not understand. At times he annoyed me in his behavior and in his new habits.
When I learned to love, however, everything changed.
Since then I have been wearing special lenses that allow me to see who is hiding beyond all fear and what I find is always something truly precious and unique.
A few days ago, she just showed me an old video that she liked and when I saw it I couldn't believe it. In that story was our story and this made me reflect.
It was she who came back from the forest to see if we would recognize her, who defied the danger of being attacked by entering the hostile environment she had always feared.
But behind that menacing-looking lion, now leader of his pack in his forest, me I recognized the defenseless and loving puppy that is still in her.
I opened my arms to that puppy, with trust and love, without fear of being attacked by the ferocious beast that it might seem from outside.
E she remembered she was still deeply the puppy who had played with me.
The puppy I had loved and still love.
Here we are both recognized, without masks or barriers.
She lives in the forest and I in the same place where we became sisters, but this does not change the love there is.
With me she took off that lion fur coat.
She understood that she doesn't need it, that I like who's inside and that I won't hurt her.
When you really love, that love stay inside and nothing can ever make you forget it.
Neither masks nor forests.
Do you know who is really behind every person we see?
Who hides behind the fear?
If someone has let you down, betrayed you or took a path you don't like and don't recognize he did it only to defend himself, but you can learn to look beyond.
You can trust and meet the lion that looks so dangerous and under its fur you will recognize the puppy with whom you began to love.
Whatever different path the people you love will take, you will always find them as long as you continue to love them.
Even if they will go to live in the forest taking the form of dangerous and hungry lions.
