You all know what it’s like to have a passion, right? And we all have a favorite place where we practice that passion. For me, writing under a tree on an empty field or up in the mountains until the stars appear, is my favorite thing in the world.
Back home I used to have a house up in the mountains, where my godmother lives and I used to go there and wonder off to explore the surroundings, sometimes having a notebook or pen handy, most of the times just climbing the hill and glance over the lake, writing only with my thoughts, planning novels and stories, becoming depressed because of my characters or happy for them. When I got my first easy to carry laptop, I replaced daydreaming and the notebook with the keyboard. For two years I have taken my laptop everywhere, used it as my main tool for writing, until one day the battery died and my new electronic notebook only worked if plugged in. I was very sad and felt like my writing days outside of the house are over, but you know what, I realized that my notebooks were still waiting for me, my pens were still applauding my need for them and so I embraced their presence again and suddenly writing under the stars was no longer impossible.
Last night, while on my balcony, with my computer plugged in, I looked at the sky and I imagined I am under a tree, somewhere up in the mountains. There were only four stars that I could see on the sky of Florence, but I created a million of them in my mind, I turned off the lights and pretended it was dark and started typing a new short story. It was a dark, morbid, maybe somehow unreadable short story, but so was my filled with stars sky and the pretended tree I was typing under. Who knows, maybe the mountains will come more often to visit me on my balcony and the characters in my brain will write themselves on the blank pages.
