It is Thursday afternoon, precisely 5:24 p.m., probably the worst hour to be sitting outside, immersed in the scorching heat, but I feel I must capture here, in the garden of El Quirofano, the emotions I am feeling and focus on them for a moment.

In two days, I will go back to Italy, closing the door of my room here in Murcia for the last time and saying goodbye with the smell of lemons in my nostrils to the fields that welcomed me generously and silently a month ago.

Who knows if these places will have memory of me, if the cathedral, the dried fruit shops, the kiosks will remember my name. I want to walk one last time through these squares, I want to enjoy the merciless and arrogant Spanish sun, all that light that takes your breath away. Who knows if these streets will retain the sound of my footsteps, of my endless walks to work, to look each day for a new life to discover, a new face whose details to memorize, a new plan to follow, to the rhythm of heartbeats and the deflagration of shared laughter mingling in the air.

Murcia has taught me to follow a new tempo, made of open, wide-open spaces, a time that, like all other times actually, you cannot completely master. The anxious and incessant productivity is only a semblance of control, the illusion of following the correct path within the scheme of things. Here, instead, I realized how necessary and physiological it is sometimes to stop and take a leap outside ourselves.

I have known many lives in this month, all so far from each other, so distant in their own intimate tides, but at the same time all connected by a motivation, a reason for having ‘stopped’. And it is this coincidence of discrepancies that fascinated me more than anything else. What a relief to slowly discover, with some initial struggle, how much we had all found ourselves here with the same quest, an often unconfessed need for answers or, at least, time to look for some. From every corner of the world, so many souls thought that the best option for themselves was to give a piece of their existence to their neighbor and, in this ‘giving’, to study themselves and begin, with a little more awareness, to sketch out their future.

I will not deny that there were days when I felt very lonely, with my hearth flying very fast and far away in the clouds. But now there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would leave again a thousand times, I would incessantly ask “Why are you here?” to anyone who crossed my way, even to a girl waiting in line with me in a fast-food restaurant.

I know that I could have done more in all aspects and I don’t have the presumption to think that I have left an indelible mark with my life, which is so small, in Life, which is so big, but I swear on what I hold most dear in the world that in these last 30 days I have spent every ounce of my energy on others. I have realized, in this way, how much the social path is the right one for me, that never have I felt so right as when I have done civic and humanitarian service. We cannot live by measuring our goodness by what we do not do, by what we deny ourselves and those we reject. I am certain that we must measure goodness by what we do, by what we create and by whom we embrace. In my future, I feel that I want to spend my life for humanity, using my words and my eyes and ears to continue to embrace stories and tell them in turn, to sift through the similarities and learn from them how even in the remotest place and eyes it is possible to find ourselves.

I know I have often been a noisy presence, and I am grateful for the patience of all the people who have somehow shared their daily lives with me, who have allowed me to mess it up a little in my sentimental flights, who have housed me in their secrets. I’m sorry for spreading a bit of disorder around, but then again, Love is Chaos, and I had no choice but to leave a bit of disarray to give away, without reserve, all the good that I had.