News that the alert had finally finished, and that we could return, have set off in me, in us, fears that we had postponed. From the moment we all fled (though we looked like a group simply walking in silence, it was a true flight, plagued with fears that were held back by that noble feeling of group obligation, fears for what we left behind and for the very real risks along the way; not even whispers, only some necessary urging) we found a way to pause our thoughts, eschew speculations, especially those of a gloomy nature, and we eagerly devoted ourselves to come up with the normality that the evidence of things outright denied us. In the bus returning us to our interrupted lives, silence has been so brave and eloquent! The fields entirely covered with the dark sand from the volcano, the first houses and utensils have turned up smothered among the mounds of fallen ash, the roads erased from where, we knew, they used to be. Celso’s collapsed roof passed before us, behind the windows of the moving bus, as a terrible substantiation of what we already supposed to be true even before we boarded the bus: The prodigious transfiguration into a black uniform of what used to be (and what in a few weeks, I need to think, will again be) lives, built-up pasts, dappled fields with distinguishable hues and even, sometimes, with surprising colours. Watching Celso’s house and some of the less fortunate others that have later passed by, like on a screen, behind the bus windows, I thought, not yet knowing, of what fate would we have to content ourselves with, and I thought that if we were not together, you and I, I would cry endlessly, with tears coming straight, monotonous, impossible to stop.