Don’t worry

She’s got her own keys now. Once in a week, she gets back from school after lunch, alone. You tried to imagine her, organizing the few hours she got before she takes her bike to attend her tennis lesson. Doing her homeworks, changing, trying to catch as much time as possible to read as much pages as possible of her book. And then riding through the city. She already told you how important these solitary moments are for her, in the streets ‘whitout neither my parents, nor my brother’. And actually, you can feel in the way she talks, in the way she keeps quiet too, something like autonomy growing, for what it means.
But what really made you expericence the changes, and what really moved you, was this tiny handwritten note she left on the second day. ‘OK, don’t worry’ followed by her name and the drawing of a heart. These were not only nice words, but a response. On the other side of the sheet you had wrote something about the lights of her bike, which she should put on getting back home at the end of the day. Her words initiated a written dialogue, which reminded you the huge one you and your wife used to have years ago, and which now lies in a big file, somewhere in a closet. You like to see this note as the first step of a renewal of this family ongoing written history.
The day after, she told you how much she liked it: ‘you know dad, it’s great that you wrote me a note, I like it. And that I could write you back another one’. Enjoying her reaction, you couldn’t help imagining next ones though, thinking also about the first SMS you will exchange. Will they replace paper notes? You don’t think so. Will Scriptopolis readers find them as lovely and as interesting for writing studies? You hope so.