Middle lands

by Claudia Ravaldi

CiaoLapo makes you enter people’s lives at a tremendous moment. And you stand with the phone in your hand, and listen to those words that come out from afar.

They are boundary words, without time, without space, without color, without weight.
And the mothers begin their speeches, no matter in what language, with these ancestral words, which start from afar, which arrive already tired, empty, heavy.
They come to me, who are almost always a stranger, and a perfect stranger, in an attempt to be grasped, hooked to the earth.
In an attempt to get real, and have weight again.
The body of women, when inhabited by a child who is no longer alive who has yet to give birth, is a middle ground, between life and death, between winter and spring.
And whoever lives on that frontier, and every day listens to the weightless words of women in the middle ground, needs to find the strength, but also the measure, to recover these women.
Bring them back here.

A thought then to me, that I’m on the phone carefully choosing the words not to say, and thanks to colleagues who put their faces, eyes and arms right there, on the border.

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