The encounter

THE ENCOUNTER

One of the feelings that accompany Sonia as she strolls through the humid and foggy woods just outside her village is the sensation of living a disturbing fairy tale from which all colours have been erased. Her mind is a collusion of spiky and incoherent fragments of lost memories.

Sonia’s thoughts escape their heavy container and run freely. “Maybe” - she speculates “I am trapped in a splinter of time that has wandered off its main course, while my own story has moved forward, leaving me alone and lost... I have been deserted by my life, by my memories, by my narrative and even by myself... Autumn leaves disengaging and flying away... I can’t move... I am the helpless, bare and wrinkled tree left to shiver in the wind and to wonder what has happened and what will become...”
Her drifting mind is suddenly startled by a joyful, glowing figure walking hesitantly towards her on the narrow and muddy path.
"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" The man’s voice is an explosion of life and yet his tone is muffled, as if belonging to an arcane and unreachable world.

Sonia’s dark eyes are sharp knifes penetrating the stranger’s watery gaze. Death seems to have swallowed everything else around her: the sounds of the whispering trees, of the birds, of the merciless wind and of all life hidden in the deep woods drop in an instant. The whole scene is frozen, covered in an unnatural and intense silence. Then it all becomes clear.
“Of course you have seen me before. I am your shadow”.