Swarming of Fireflies

A strong young man in his mid-twenties, yet his thick black hair is streaked with grey due to the series of shocks he had been through during his almost one-year odyssey in search for peace far enough from the Taliban. His parents made him run away from home, in order to save the life of the eldest son of the influential family. Thus the teen-age boy hit the road unwillingly, leaving behind unfinished dreams and the loved ones. He was still a minor when he applied for international protection in Italy.

Nevertheless, it is neither the refugee status, nor the dramatic fate that makes my special person. During my volunteer service I gained the friendship of many who had endured overwhelming hardships. He is somehow different from all of them, and I had been searching for an explanation for several months, trying to guess the riddle of his oddness, without success.

He seemed to me a man of inexplicable contradictions. Strolling along the streets of the Adriatic town, the smiling, sociable boy knows and greets almost every other person cordially whom he comes across. However, one can never know what is passing in his mind. He is full of mysteries, memories he wants to be free of. I would spend a lot of time with him on account of my volunteer duties, still I knew just a couple of facts about him.

Then, all of a sudden, he revealed his essential self to me. The story he told me on a late-autumn morning impressed me deeply. It was like the myriad of glowing fireflies swarming by the cottage, my tiny Italian home, on June nights: drops of grace that I was offered to change my perception of darkness, mystery and the unknown.

On that morning I was harvesting lettuce with him in the fields. “Do you know that I’ve been sold?” he asked me abruptly. Then, afterwards, he recounted the story of how he had recently been betrayed by local ‘gangsters’ who keep an eye on him constantly.  It was the narrative of a grandiose conspiracy against him, which fills his heart with unrest. Due to the absurd elements of his story, I understood that all I’d heard was nothing but the paranoid fantasy of a psychiatrically disturbed man.

My special person doesn’t recognise that he is sick. He is firmly convinced of the truth of his fictions. He believes he’s a well-known man, and regularly finds hidden messages about himself in news reports, articles, films and books.

When the curtain dropped, suddenly a friend was standing in front of me, whom I hadn’t known before. My previous assumptions, aiming to rationalise his paradoxical personality, and believed to be fairly solid, turned out to be false. I totally misunderstood him. Now I know that his often puzzled eyes, which I used to find so profoundly discordant with his pride and apparent self-confidence, in fact reflect fragility, fear and suspicion.

To this very day I don’t know to what I should attribute the sincere disclosure of his carefully guarded secrets. Whatever the reason, he has placed his confidence in me, so I owe it to him to try my best to lend him a hand. Thus, before leaving Italy, I focused my energy on figuring out if there was any way or anyone to help him. I realised that almost no one was aware of his disease. Those who were didn’t seem concerned. Then I got in touch with the people closest to him. They promised me to do their best for him. Despite our efforts, he refuses to go to see a psychiatrist. But I am convinced that affectionate care and prayer will bear fruit. He says only God could save him. Millions of refugees suffer from psychological disorders. They are entirely in God’s mercy.

We talk to each other every week. Since he considers modern communications as a means of spying, our discussions are empty; we just scratch the surface. Till we don’t meet face to face once more, he won’t open himself up to me again, of this I am sure. But I don’t mind. I just go on with the prayer and the therapy of affection.