Right on the night when the moon shines with a cold, ancient blue — the one they call the blue moon — the animals awaken and bathe in a stellar magic that seems poured from the depths of the universe. That night I felt within my spirit a kind of silent reception, as if a kind soul were being gently welcomed by the darkness.

I barely knew her. A couple of fleeting encounters were enough for her presence to remain etched in me. Ann , She was already an elderly woman, whom old age had played the cruelest of games: it had stolen her memories. They said that dementia takes both the sweet and the bitter moments that shape you, that it strips the entire fan of experience until only small fragments float in the mist. In the end, the only thing that remains intact is the essence that still glows, faintly, in the depths of the eyes. The window of the soul, as the poets say, stays open even though the house is almost empty.

I knew she loved chocolate. On a couple of occasions I offered her some, and she always accepted with that docile, grateful smile that seemed to come from very far away. Today I regret not having done it more often.

Outside her room they placed a blue sponge rabbit so she could recognize her door in the middle of the fog of her mind. That blue rabbit was her lighthouse. She needed a wheelchair to move, help to dress, to go to the bathroom. Even so, she never complained. She projected a natural gentleness, a docility that made one think that in her younger years she must have been a woman of serene and strong temperament. Her short, gray, very straight hair shone especially a week before she left; they had styled it and she looked fresh, almost cheerful, as if life were giving her one last caress before taking her away.

Then came the day I missed my usual visit. I found her in her room with oxygen. At first I thought it might be a small crisis. But life slips away like water through the fingers, without warning, and suddenly she was no longer there.

I never knew the full details of her story. I only know that her departure hurt me in a deep place of the soul, one that has no name. The sweet blue rabbit that loved chocolate now rests forever.

My heart wishes, with a serene melancholy, that she was happy. That she did not suffer in her final moments. That she knew true love in all its possible forms, and that, despite the stolen memories, she lived a full life.

And when the blue moon returns each year, I will know that it is her shining softly from the other side, bathing the world with that cold and tender light, reminding us that even what is forgotten continues to exist somewhere in the great labyrinth of time.