Diary from L'Aquila

10 days after. I have been awake for some time, in the cozy silence of this small house by the sea, a perfect holiday situation along the Abruzzo coast. Daylight is not coming, and sleep is not coming. Only physical exhaustion brings me sleep since the earthquake. We were surprised at 3.32 am, in defenseless sleep. Darkness does not bring sleep, I am uneasy with darkness. Thoughts and memories fill the night, and the feeling of being privileged, the guilty feeling of being chosen for survival by some blind unknown force, the devastating knowledge of what might have been. The slow motion movie of the earthquake is endlessly rewound and repeated in the sleepless night. I relive my first thought "It's the end", I keep seeing the walls of my house shaken by giant hands, the house resisting, the objects in pieces, the wardrobes that might have turned into killers. We had lost the contact with Mother Earth, lost the historical memories of the big earthquakes of the past.

And now as prehistoric creatures we lit fires in our caves to keep away beasts, we turn on lights, we keep our family near us. I am afraid of sleep, someone must wake by the fire to alert the group of dangers, the family group must survive. I feel an ancestral knowledge deep down inside me, at work all the time, clipping the redundant twigs in my life routine. In the sleepless darkness I am redesigning what is left of my life, I do not know for how long I will still be on Earth, but nothing will ever be the same. The well-known guilty relief I often experienced watching disasters on TV has gone, now I am at the other end of the camera, now it has happened to me and the rest of the world is watching.

In my handbag there is everything I may possibly need, in my car there is everything we may need to survive for a couple of days: tank full, water bottles, hypertension pills, sanitary towels, spare glasses, mobile chargers, clothes change, blankets. I am perfectly ready for an earthquake, now.