Chapter 66 Ransom
In the present
2024
It’s time to start over.
As you do at twenty. With that naïve load of emotions and expectations. Looking ahead. Redesigning the future while living the present.
There is still time for me to take my life back into my hands.
It is time to erase, to forget thirty years in which I believed myself to be a certain person, with certain abilities, a certain role, a certain standing.
To take an important piece of my story and let it go.
To abandon the script I performed, the part I mimicked to please others.
The easy, carefree life of youth has finally presented the bill.
I felt it coming, but there was no safe shelter to run to when disaster struck me like an unrelenting wave.
Places, people, things I will never see again. I will grow used to their absence, to their deafening silence.
I will place everything in a drawer and close it forever.
I will distance myself from negativity, from the toxic competition that poisoned my soul and ruined my heart. I will mend what can be mended, but I will glue it back together with the most precious gold—never again with filth.
I will change, forget, and forgive.
It wasn’t an adverse destiny, but a stage of my growth.
I accept calmly that I wasn’t ready.
I acknowledge that I played with life, that I toyed with it, took it lightly until this crucial lesson.
And now?
I will earn recognition even in the service of others, I will earn their respect.
I will reorganize my time and my work.
I will reinvent myself so I can work again.
I will rediscover the value of what I studied, of my best abilities. I will redesign a career for myself.
I will give shape to a thousand new ideas.
I will walk again, look up again at the sky and the stars.
I will reassess friendship, affection, and love.
I will write a book.