The essay that hit me like a punch in the stomach!

2025-09-27 09:58:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

"- Get out of here! Go back to Rome! You are young and the world is yours. I am old. I don't want to hear you anymore! I want to hear others talk about you! Don't come back! Don't remember us! Don't look back! Don't write! Don't give in to nostalgia! Forget us all! If you come back, don't come to see me! I won't let you enter my house! Do you understand?

- Thank you! For everything you did for me!

- Whatever you do, love it. Just like you loved this cinema's broadcast booth, filled with film reels, when you were little..."

I think each of us has one or more films that have stuck in our minds or hearts. For me, one of them is "Cinema Paradiso", 1988.

I'm not analyzing it here. I just wrote this extraordinary and extremely emotionally charged dialogue, one of the many highlights of the film.

Why did I write it? Because I just read an essay by one of my high school seniors: “Why did I decide to leave Albania?

I have decided to leave...

...Because you can't always live with the hope that tomorrow will be better, when every day today tells you the opposite.

Because I am increasingly convinced that in Albania I cannot build a good life with honest sweat, with my own work and effort, because value and career are not measured by work and knowledge, but by clientelistic connections, the arrogance of power and corruption.

I decided to leave with pain because I am realizing that justice does not work, the strong make the law, politics belongs to the minority that shares power and privileges, while we, the honest majority, are on the verge of survival.

I'm leaving because I want a future, not an endless wait and constant disappointment for myself and my family that I will create tomorrow, for my children when I bring them to life.

And to teach them that corruption is not stronger than education, and injustice is not faster and stronger than the law.

I decide to leave, because love for the country is not enough, when everything in this country doesn't see you as a citizen...

Leaving is not a betrayal, nor a lack of love for Albania. On the contrary! It is an expression of my love and powerlessness to change the poisoning in the blood of the homeland!

Our departure is a silent protest against a system that does not allow you to live with dignity and a choice not to waste our years in a place where time has frozen, hope has been killed, and each of us is a hostage to injustice.

But I know that wherever I go, I will always carry my homeland like an open wound!"/ CNA