I heard footsteps in the corridor again, but this time the footsteps gave me a familiar feeling. I knew those footsteps. They are as unique as a voice. When I was a schoolboy lying in bed, I could identify my family members by the way they walked up the stairs. My father had a heavy step, almost dropping onto the stairs with a crash, and my mother had a rather light, almost inaudible, but quick step. The footsteps I heard now had familiar elements, but there were too many at once to be able to determine with certainty who it was.
Discomfort rose up inside of me. I didn't know if I wanted to see anyone now. I already felt threatened and cut off from my own shell, how could I face my beloved ones and feel safe with them? Would it cause even more anxiety in me if I couldn't even feel a connection to them?
The door swung open all at once and the first shape that burst into the room brought in a surge of warmth and its love pierced through the cocoon that had formed around me all at once, filling up my heart. I saw my wife. She dropped something from her hands and stormed towards me and into my field of vision. With tears in her eyes, she threw her arms around my neck and sobbed. My body was numb, but I could feel her breath in my ear and I felt something again. An intimate touch. A shiver in my body. I looked over my wife's shoulder and saw that my mother and father had also stepped in. My mother tried to hide her own pain under a tortured smile, which she was only partly successful at; my father was a stranger to feeling anything at all. My mother had picked up what my wife had dropped. In her one hand was a book, which was due to my wife's profession, in the other a net of oranges, which I loved more than anything. The look of my beloved ones pierced through my shell, drilled a hole in it and let a beam of warmth fall on my already chilled heart. And yet the cocoon remained, stable and cold. One swallow does not make a summer.