How can you restore stability and peace to a soul that has been thrashing in a closed circle for years?

People tell you what helps. Read. Pray. Listen to calming music. Spend time with people who have a soothing effect.

What if you wake up empty every single morning? What if you don't want to talk to anyone, even the people who truly mean well? The suffocation from the weight of thoughts in your head is crippling, and nothing on that list of good advice even reaches the place where it hurts.

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At first glance it is a strict little plant, a small tree just over half a meter tall. It came to me as a gift a couple of years ago, at a time when my world was anything but steady. It stepped into that shaky world very quietly and settled into its white pot like a bird into its nest.

It has been with me ever since. Through the mornings I didn't want to begin and the nights that didn't want to end. Through the long silences. It saw all of it, and it never said a word.

It never asked me how I was. It never gave me advice. It never needed me to be better than I was that day.

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I sit down on the sofa, and before I can even pull the blanket over my knees, Tobby is already there. He climbs into my lap, all of him, as if he were still the small puppy he once was. He is far too big for this. My legs go numb. I can barely breathe. And I would not move him for anything in the world.

Because in those moments I always ask myself the same question: how did I deserve this creature?

I don't have an answer. Maybe in some previous life I was a very good person, and Tobby is my prize. Maybe it is simply luck. But I know that of all the people in the world, this pure, gentle soul chose me to be his mom. And I still can't quite believe it.

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I am sitting far from home when the message comes.

I came to Bari with almost nothing left. I came to St. Nicholas the way you come to a door when you have no strength to knock: just to stand near it, just to be close to something that might hold me for a while. For once, this journey is only for me.

My phone lights up. You are not here when I need you.

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For years, my days were built on one word.

I must get up. I must go to work. I must answer, cook, smile, hold everything together. I must not fall apart, at least not where anyone can see.

I did all of it. Every day. And I did it well, I think. But I did it the way a train keeps moving after the engine has stopped: on inertia, on the rails, because there was nowhere else to go.

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When I was grieving, people talked to me a lot. Most of them loved me. Most of them meant well. And most of their words made it worse.

I want to share some of them here. Not to blame anyone, but because if you have heard them too, you should know: it wasn't you. Those words were heavy for anyone to carry.

I heard this when I was still in the middle of it. It made my tears feel like a mistake, something I was doing wrong and should already have finished.

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Let's just agree on one thing from the start: Tobby is the most photogenic chocolate croissant in the world.

Golden-brown. Perfectly curled when he sleeps. Slightly glossy. And, like any good croissant, he becomes absolutely irresistible the moment cheese enters the picture.

Because cheese is not food to Tobby. Cheese is the great love of his life.

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Here is another story about Tobby and his remarkable physical abilities.

Tobby is strong. No, wait. Tobby is strong.

His chest is so powerful that it works like a locomotive engine: it goes first, and the rest of the dog simply follows behind it, carriage after carriage. And when that locomotive spots something interesting on the horizon, it stops being transport and becomes a natural disaster.

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Tobby is a slim gentleman. Long legs, a narrow waist, an elegant line from nose to tail. When he walks across the room, he looks like a dog who could run a marathon, or at least seriously consider one.

The moment Tobby sits or lies down, something happens. The athlete disappears. The long legs fold away somewhere. The body settles, spreads, softens. And where a slender Labrador stood a second ago, there is now a good, round, farm-style roast chicken.

Look at him from above. The back legs stick out on both sides, perfectly symmetrical, exactly like drumsticks on a Sunday platter. The soft round back in the middle. Everything golden and glossy and ready to be served.

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If I had to name the worst poison in the world, I wouldn't choose anything from a laboratory. I would choose doubt.

It has no color and no smell. It doesn't burn. It works slowly, drop by drop, so quietly that for years you don't even notice you are being poisoned. You just feel a little less sure every day. A little less steady. A little less yourself.

Doubt has been in my life for as long as I can remember.

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Someone asked me recently about a good moment from the past year. Something small. A day that felt light.

It's not that there were none. I know there were. I laughed at things. I sat in the sun. I ate meals, I went places, I said “that was nice” and probably meant it. But when I go looking for those moments now, the shelf is empty.

Grief takes up the whole room. It doesn't leave space for anything else to stay.

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Some dogs are taught good manners. Tobby was born with them.

Nobody ever showed him how to cross his paws. Nobody explained that a gentleman lies down slowly, never all at once, and that the chin should stay slightly raised, as if listening to something only he can hear. He simply knows. It came with him, the way the chocolate color came with him, and the eyebrows that move when he thinks.

Look at him on the floor in the evening. Front paws crossed, one neatly over the other. Back legs stretched out behind him with the ease of someone who has nothing to prove. Head turned in profile toward the window, calm and a little distant.

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Every love story has a rival. Tobby's has cheese.

If cheese appears anywhere in the house, in a fridge being opened two rooms away, in a sandwich, in a single crumb on the floor, Tobby knows. Cheese is not a food for him. It is an event. Nothing in this world competes with cheese.

But cheese is a passion. Apples are love.

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Someone makes a joke, and I laugh. Someone tells a story, and I smile in the right places. Someone asks how I am, and I find something light to say, because I can see in their eyes that they need it to be light.

I don't laugh because something is funny. I laugh so that no one has to feel uncomfortable around my sadness.

I have been holding my own face up for other people.

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For most of my life, people knew me before they met me.

Not by my name. By whose light I stood in.

“Oh, so you're…” And then came a sentence that had nothing to do with me. Every time, something burned inside, like stepping into a shower that is far too hot. For one second, I disappeared.

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If you saw Tobby asleep, you would think he had just come home from twenty hours in a coal mine.

He hasn't, of course. His day usually includes one walk, two naps, a careful inspection of the kitchen and a few serious conversations with the yard cats through the window. But by evening, he collapses as if he has carried the whole world on his back and no one has thanked him for it.

First comes the choosing of the spot. It must be soft. It must be warm. And most importantly, it must be next to one of us. Not near. Next to. Tobby measures distance in centimeters, and the right number is zero.

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The best part of my day lasts only a little while.

It is still almost dark when we step outside. Tobby goes first, the way he always does, as if he has been waiting all night just for this. The street is empty. The houses are still asleep. Somewhere a bird tries the first note of the day, another answers, and slowly the morning begins to sing.

The air is cool and smells of wet leaves. Sometimes a few raindrops land on my face, and I don't wipe them away. Far off, the first cars start their journey, and then the quiet comes back, softer than before.

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Not a particular song. All of it. The moment any melody began, something in me tightened, the way you flinch when someone touches a bruise you forgot was there.

I had gone very quiet inside. Not peaceful, just quiet, the kind of quiet you keep around something fragile so it won't break any further. In that silence I didn't have to feel more than I already did. I didn't have to explain anything, not even to myself.

And music always asked for something. To feel along with it. To be moved. To remember. I had nothing left to give it. So I let the silence stay.

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Until this year, I had never organized a trip myself.

There had always been someone else who booked, decided, paid and led the way. Then last year, something pulled me to Bari, to Saint Nicholas. I went with my daughter and a dear friend, and for the first time in my life, I planned and paid for the whole trip on my own. Every ticket, every room, every detail. I wrote about those three days in Where My Heart Started Beating Again. I came back different. Not healed, but a little braver. As if I had discovered that I could still decide, still choose, still go somewhere because my heart asked me to.

What happened next, I still can't quite believe.

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For a long time, I answered that question honestly. And every time I did, I felt worse.

I would start explaining: the nights, the heaviness, the days I could barely get through. I watched faces change. Some looked worried, some uncomfortable, some already searching for advice. And as I listened to my own voice describing it all again, the pain didn't shrink. It grew. Each time I said it out loud, I lived it again. I handed it over, and somehow it came back to me heavier.

I started to hate those conversations. Then I started to hate myself in them. I felt exposed, as if I had undressed in front of people who had only asked a polite question in passing.

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