"She felt drawn to him in ways she didn't understand."
Her fingers slipped between the keys of the typewriter and the world as we know it disappeared into oceans of emotions that rippled and lapped against the pages like waves against the shore.
and although her mind could automatically write hundreds of letters in a day, during the night she could not avoid taking a pencil and writing to him, although Claudia and Dietfried had taken her to the very grave where he was supposed to rest, she always began her letters with his name, the one that accustomed her ear to obey without measure, the one that looked at her without fear, the one that she still tried to decipher the look on his eyes and that she carried like a stigma hanging on her chest like a memory that did not want to die, "Gilbert".
The flames of the siege, the sound of the mines and the explosions of the heavy artillery, he could still smell the gunpowder and hear the whistle of the bullets graze her skin. The blinding breath of the major as he ordered her to mission impossible, the vision crowded and blurred by tears prevented her from thinking clearly, then she felt the world and her body burn.
By the time she realized her arms were lifelessly hanging in front of her and Gilbert's pale, scourged face screaming her name was the only thing that existed in that instant. No bullets, no incessant explosions, just the terror of that moment.
She shook her head and tore off the sheet, again she had caught himself writing to him and again from the last time her eyes saw him, from the last time she heard his voice calling her name. again, she caught herself writing letters to him.
She turned her eyes to her hands, turned into pieces of metal, opened and closed her palms looking for answers that for her age and size of life were still unfinished truths.
She took a new sheet of paper and returned to capture on paper the longing that nested inside her and which still did not make sense, what is love, what did he mean by loving her? none of these words fit in her little dictionary.
Her universe only revolved around the misery of war, and she wished with all her being to be a weapon again, his weapon, and maybe that was the kind of love that she still did not understand, in her own way she loved to follow his orders and spend her days in trenches and military tents.
And maybe she could go even further, it wasn't just love that she didn't know, she felt it, but she didn't understand it, what was happiness for someone like Violet, had she ever experienced that feeling?
And here she was writing letters to nobody….
