Chapter 39 Samira
Samira
I learned, very young, how to leave my body.
It happened before I understood what it meant to stay.
When the pain came—when the world narrowed to hands and weight and breath that wasn’t mine—I let my mind rise up and away, like smoke slipping through a crack in a room that had run out of air. I didn’t fight it. Fighting only made it worse. Fighting taught my body things it never forgot.
So I learned how to disappear.
I went somewhere else.
I was five again.
The sun sat high and warm above me, the sky so blue it felt endless, like it might go on forever if I stared hard enough.
My father’s hands were strong and steady as he lifted me into the air, his grip sure, practiced, safe.
I remembered the sound of my laughter—clear and unguarded, spilling out of me like something that could never be taken away.
“Higher,” I’d begged.
And he had smiled and obliged.
Up I went, weightless for one perfect heartbeat, suspended between earth and sky before he caught me again. He always caught me. His laugh rumbled against my ribs when he pulled me close, my cheek pressed to his shoulder, the smell of soap and sun clinging to his shirt.
That was the last time I remember feeling truly safe.
I didn’t know it then. Of course I didn’t. No one ever knows when they are living inside their final moment of peace. Hindsight is a cruel gift—it shows you exactly when the light went out, long after you’ve learned how to survive without it.
If I had known—if I had understood how rare that moment was—I would have memorized everything.
The cicadas buzzing in the trees. The heat of the sun on my skin. The way his hands never trembled. The way the world felt wide and kind and possible, like it hadn’t yet learned how to hurt me.
Instead, I let it pass.
Now, as my body endured what my mind refused to name, I clung to that memory like a talisman. I held onto it while the present dissolved into something unreal, distant, like a nightmare happening to someone else.
The world, I thought dimly, was a cruel place.
It didn’t break you once and move on. It broke you again and again, each time convincing you that this was all there was. That pain was permanent. That survival was the same thing as living.
I believed that for a long time.
Until Marcello.
His face drifted into my thoughts without warning, achingly clear. The way he looked at me—not like something fragile or ruined, but like something rare. Like something worth protecting. He never said it outright, never tried to convince me.
He just showed me.
That there was a life beyond endurance. That life could be beautiful.
Beautiful like the earth when winter finally loosens its grip.
Like butterflies emerging from their long hibernation, wings soft and damp, unfolding slowly until they remember how to fly.
Fields turning green again after months of barren brown.
Rivers swelling with snowmelt—not to destroy, but to feed everything in their path.
I thought of mornings with sunlight creeping through curtains. Of warmth that didn’t come with conditions. Of laughter that wasn’t armor, and a future that didn’t feel like something to brace for.
If I had to do it all again—if I had been given one more chance—I would have lived differently.
I would have run sooner. Loved harder. Believed myself worthy of more than survival. I would have trusted the soundless instinct that whispered this is not all there is long before I learned how expensive hope could be.
Marcello cracked something open inside me that the world had tried very hard to seal shut.
And maybe that was why my mind floated now—why it refused to stay anchored in the horror of the present. Because somewhere deep inside, I knew this moment did not get to define me.
I was not here.
I was five years old—weightless and laughing—held safely in arms that knew how to catch me.
And I held onto that truth—small, fragile, incandescent—as my body endured what my soul would not.
Because even now—even here—I knew, with aching certainty, that life could be beautiful. And one day—if I survived this—I would claim it.
Death, I thought, must feel different for everyone.
If people survived it—if they crossed that threshold and came back whole—we would have words for it. We would have language that didn’t stutter or collapse when it tried to describe the end. But no one returned with answers. They returned with silence.
Or not at all.
So no one could really tell you what death felt like.
But I could tell you what it felt like to want it.
It felt like exhaustion so deep it settled into my bones.
Like being scraped hollow from the inside out until there was nothing left to protect.
It felt like lying on cold ground and thinking—truly thinking—that becoming part of the dirt beneath me would be kinder than enduring one more second of a madman’s hands.
I was so tired.
My body didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore. Pain came and went in dull, distant waves, as if it were happening to someone else. Sounds blurred together. Voices drifted in and out—too loud, too far away. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed.
I thought this might be dying.
And the strangest thing was—I wasn’t afraid.
I had walked away from the only solid thing I had ever known. The only safety. The only comfort.
Marcello.
At the time, it had felt brave. Like I was reclaiming myself. Choosing truth over illusion.
But lying there now, suspended between breaths, I understood something I couldn’t then.
What Marcello did—what broke me—was not born of cruelty.
It was born of fear. Of desperation. Of trying, in his own fractured way, to protect the fragile space that remained in my mind after the world had already taken so much. He had lied to me not to own me, but to keep me whole. To keep me from splintering under memories I wasn’t ready to carry.
I saw it now.
And I accepted it.
Some sins were easier to stomach than others. Some lies were told because the truth would annihilate what little remained.
And evil—real evil—didn’t always wear the same face. Sometimes it existed as balance. As a necessary counterweight to monsters who roamed unchecked, who took and took and took without remorse or restraint.
Faced with my ex’s violence—his precise, calculated cruelty—I would have chosen Marcello’s untruths every time. I would have chosen imperfect safety over honest terror. I would have chosen a man who tried to save me, even if he did it the wrong way.
I thought of Marcello then—not as blood or shadows, but as warmth. As arms around me in the dark. As a voice telling me to breathe when I had forgotten how.
If this was the end, then I wanted my final truth to be this:
I was loved.
Not gently.
Not cleanly.
But fiercely. Enough to make a man lie to himself about what was right, just so I could have one small pocket of peace.
The world grew thick with tension. Heavier.
And if I slipped away in this moment, I hoped he knew—I didn’t leave angry. I left understanding him. And forgiving him.