To the Three of Us, Against Time.

We walked together when our shoes were still too big for us and life was immense on us.

We were only little girls, our hearts full of questions and the world still new and untried. We shared corridors, secrets, laughter that put out the lights of the night and that strange courage of growing up when we still had no idea who we would become.

In those boarding school years, when childhood was beginning to say goodbye and adolescence was opening its uncertain doors, we slowly became home to one another. A home without walls, woven from confidences, hidden tears, from understandings that needed no explanation.

We did not know it then, but we were planting something that time would never be able to uproot.

Then came our lives, our loves, children, dogs, paths that fork, countries that separate us and years that pass.

And yet, something of those girls remains intact.

Our lives, like sister rivers, have sought their own courses: sometimes close, sometimes lost in the distance, but carrying within them the memory of the same source. There are bonds that do not need a daily presence to exist. A voice is enough, a look of recognition, a reunion in which time seems to stop for a moment and returns us, intact, to who we were.

We have always found one another. Sometimes in an embrace, sometimes in a conversation, sometimes in that shared silence where there is no need to tell the whole story because the other already knows the beginning.

Perhaps that is friendship, having someone in the world who remembers who you were before life changed your name.

Someone who has known the earliest versions of you and still recognizes you beneath all those that came after.

No distance ever erased us. Each kilometre taught us, in its own way, that being far away is not the same as being absent, that time can transform our lives without undoing what binds us.

And today, when I look back, I do not see only two friends. I see the girls we were, the women we became, everything we went through without knowing that, somehow, we were still walking together.

What a privilege to have grown up with you. What a gift to keep finding one another on this strange journey of learning to live.

If we ever become girls again, I want to find you there, in those corridors, with our shoes too big and our whole lives waiting for us. And if time keeps taking us down different paths, may we never forget this:

there are people who pass through our lives, and others who stay in the invisible weave of who we are.

You are among them. My companions in those first steps, my witnesses through the years, my sisters from a shared childhood.

And if life were to grant us a thousand more lives, a thousand geographies, a thousand different ways to exist, I would wish that in one of them we might recognize one another again.

Perhaps in a corridor, or sitting on the floor leaning against that wall, perhaps in a laugh, perhaps in that inexplicable certainty of having found someone the soul already knew.

And then, once more, not yet knowing what awaits us, we would walk together again.

Because there are friendships that do not belong to time.

They pass through it.

Victoria Inaudi

With love to my friends Maggie and Euge.