On that day, an Italian, unknown to me, announced to me by phone that my sister Marina had just died of a heart attack. He found her dead in her small apartment in Milan, lying on the floor. Next to her was the syringe with the dose of heroin she had just taken - adulterated, as it turned out.

Marina was involved in various detox communities in cities in Italy and Portugal for thirty years. She tried to quit drugs but couldn't succeed.

She stayed clean for a few months and then found refuge in heroin again. "In which reality exactly do you want me to reintegrate?" she once told me.

In this book, I give her a voice. To speak about the reasons that led her to drugs, about her constant need to flirt with death, as if through this macabre flirtation she could heal her wounds and alleviate the pain she felt. In her tragic life, the sick relationship with her mother played a decisive role, a relationship that unfortunately affected both her and my communication with her for a long time. Now that both women are no longer alive, I was able to see my sister's face more clearly, to illuminate aspects of her personality that repelled me and kept me away from her. I reread the letters and notes we had exchanged over the years, dug up old photos that were stacked in boxes, recalled moments from our carefree summers in Spetses when she was still a cute little girl, and others later, painful ones, from our brief encounters in Rome.

"Now I will speak," is her swan song. What she didn't say while she was alive - as someone else monopolized the role of narrator - she says now in this dramatic fragmented monologue. Every word of hers emphasizes her unparalleled strength, but also her unbearable loneliness.