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Mastering Etsy | Creative Digital Haven

Unlock the secrets to thriving in the digital marketplace with 'Mastering Etsy.' This comprehensive guide delves deep into the art of sellin

[ilpierpo]

Prologue

I imagined myself free for years. A common thought, I believe, for anyone who has to serve a sentence, although in my case it’s harder to imagine a future outside those walls.

The fundamental difference between what I expect and what the others dream of lies in the fact that I have no idea of how the outside world is.

I don’t remember anything about my past!

There is a television in prison of course, they describe it, but what will I find out there in the end?

Therefore the desire to get out is due to that hope,  which with time turned into conviction, that I will be able to remember my past.

Conviction that became fear once they informed me of the upcoming release. Panic. Of what I would do out there, because while the other prisoners could go back to their loved ones and their friends once they served their time... I had no one.

No one came to visit me besides the lawyer, my world was all there, locked up within those walls.

My friends, my family, were the other prisoners, the prison guards.

The morning of zero hour, or rather zero day, when they returned my things, they also gave me a letter that I put in the inside pocket of my bag without reading it.

When the gates opened I started crying, I begged the prison guards to make me stay, I felt totally lost. I was safe there after all, I ate, I had a place to sleep, relate. Now?

They had to literally throw me out by force.

And when the gates closed, everything around me started spinning, I was paralyzed. Instead of legs it felt like I had two concrete blocks.

I don’t know after how long I was able to take the first steps.

I struggled to start walking and only when I went past the cemetery did my muscles begin to loosen and I increased the pace. Following the road I reached the city. The feeling of emptiness, the tears I couldn’t control, reminded me of a TV report about a child that got lost, he cried, and despite all the people that were trying to comfort him, he kept calling his mother.

I tried stopping a person, then another and another. Everyone ran away as soon as I headed in their direction, until an old man, noticing me crying against the wall, approached me and revealed the mystery: the news of my release had been broken by the local newspapers the day before. They ran away because they recognized me!

And even if my innocence had been proven, for them I was and would forever be, the “monster” who had slaughtered his parents, well-known and respectable people, in their sleep.

There, that was the only thing I knew about my past, why I was in prison. But who were my parents? I collected all the articles regarding my case, and apart from the first few days when I screamed my innocence – yes, I remembered nothing, but I knew I had not committed what they accused me of – I gave up and for a while I considered myself a “monster” too. Slowly I managed to change everyone’s mind, prisoners, prison guards, director, until they appreciated and cared for me.

I began wandering the streets, sleeping where I could, I didn’t eat for days because nobody wanted me to go into their shop or restaurant.

Only the pastor treated me as a human being welcoming me for a few nights and giving me food. He advised me to leave that place and took care of buying me some provisions.

Although I wished to show those people that they were wrong, I decided to follow his advice.

After days of walking I reached Novara, where I stayed for three weeks. At least almost no one  recognized me there. I also found a place to sleep, and the money I earned in prison allowed me to survive for two weeks. I spent the third on the streets.

Only when I was exhausted, rummaging in the bag searching for some change to buy food, did I find that famous envelope.

When I opened it and saw that it contained money, I smiled for the first time in weeks. I read the letter after buying something to eat.

The sender, the notary office of a certain Mr Arciboldi, included besides the money, a train ticket and a letter in which he explained that I was the recipient of the inheritance of an aunt of mine,  as well as the directions to his office.

It took me a month to decide to go meet him.