LET IT GLOW

After a traumatic few years, a spell at Kamalaya and Absolute Sanctuary on Koh Samui brings Chloe Bottero back from the brink

- Chloe Bottero

Non-stop sunshine would have been too much after three years that felt like one long dark tunnel, the light too bright and insensitive. Instead, I arrive, exhausted, on Koh Samui during the monsoon, the wet jungle swaying. The season cradles me. Its air is a warm embrace of frangipani, chlorophyll, and earth. Its rains feel compassionate, falling on my belly like fat tears that evaporate. Then sunshine peers from pillowy clouds that beckon me to lie down. A lullaby of drops helps me drift off to sleep at night and a far-off storm flashing on the horizon expels my subliminal rage, so I awake refreshed to birdsong.

Rage is one of many emotions compacted inside me like coal. For years, I have suppressed feeling, lived day to day, hour to hour, fire-fighting, awaiting a break in the clouds. In spring 2020, the pandemic had promised to be a productive time for redrafting my novel, but nothing could have prepared me for what was to come. When my sibling abandoned my Piedmont-based octogenarian father, a sufferer of Parkinson's with cognitive impairment, I drove to Italy, taking my sick mother. It transpired that he had been tricked out of his wine estate and beloved home of 40 years by the same family he had bankrolled and employed all his life. They were trying to evict him. Due to loopholes, destroyed documents, and a painfully slow legal system, we were told the situation was hopeless.