This is a companion piece to my story Think of me, but you don't have to read that one first. It's right after Sara's departure. Sara's POV.
Thanks for CSIGeekFan for the beta work.
Motion
"Move. Move without looking back."
If I do, I'll break down…
All my life, I've gone forward, always faster, always deeper in me, not to be caught up by my demons. As hard as I tried, I lost that fight. Now I realize that it was already written.
I made the mistake, I stopped running for a while, trying to be happy with the only person who really mattered to me. What an idiot! As if I could be happy! Yet, it had already been proven that life had nothing good to offer me. I can't stand idly by anymore, while the ghosts of a past that haunts me are destroying me. I can't draw back now, I have to go on.
I'm so sorry … Only in motion do I become steadier.
In the cab that drives me to the airport, while I look at the lights of the city I've lived in for more than seven years and where you're still living, I feel that leaving is right. This is tearing my heart apart, but it's right. The humming of the engine reassures me as well as the landscape passing before my eyes. The impression of speed created by the wind sweeping in through my hair is relaxing me.
They won't catch me.
Even though leaving you was the most difficult thing to decide, I knew it was the only thing to be done.
Parting is motion.
The pain caused by your absence at my side will ease the one caused by having all these things in my head I can't put to rest: my mother's cries the second before she grabs that knife; my father's eyes filled with rage each time he beat one of us up; my brother's fear that mirrored mine.
I go through those moments again with every scene I process. I see it in the eyes of abused women, in the coolness and rigor of bodies, in the sadness of those who just lost a loved one, in the lies of those who cling to anything to defend themselves.
I shake them off like dust.
My flight won't board before an hour. I spend the remaining time rooting in my mind what I want to remember of us. These memories will bring me the strength to carry on with my journey when I run out of breath. I'm under the impression that I am going to need it quite often.
The smell of coffee freshly brewed on our mornings together, the smell of your cologne, your smell on my pillow, the smell of our nights …
The sound of your laughter, the sound of my name on your lips, the sound of your voice in my phone, the sound of your voice when you hum, when you love me, the sound of you when you sleep …
Our looks avoiding one another, our looks trying to catch each other, your eyes smiling tenderly, your eyes full of love, the reflection of my love in your look …
Your hand gripping mine, your hand in my hair or on my cheek, your hand roaming all over my body, eager for softness…
The taste of your skin, the taste of your lips, the taste of life together, the taste of happiness …
I have to get a grip on myself before being overwhelmed. I can never stop to look back at memories.
Motion is life. Look at the Earth. It turns – rotating yet remaining still – but it turns all the same.
It's time. I board for a trip whose destination and length are unknown to me.
I settle in my window seat. I always ask for the window.
As takeoff draws closer, I manage to relax. And I recall this dream I have regularly. For as long as my memory goes back, it's a constant in my life when everything is a bit tough.
I dream I fly off, suspended in this mad running. I fly not to remain nailed to the floor. I take off, I flee. When I have no strength left, I glide, far, farther, always farther. I flutter and I twirl, in a ballet of spirals, dives and loops in the clouds.
And euphoria overtakes me. Have you ever heard of exhilaration from height? It has to be this. This can only be this. Thoughtlessness, freedom. I finally got rid of them. So I burst out laughing!
The roaring of jet engines brings me back to reality, and instantaneously I'm in the air, where time does not exist anymore. You save one hour, you waste one hour, you're numbed from jet lag. Where distance does not exist anymore. You change country, language. Ten thousand feet high, miles become feet, feet become inches, men become ants, insignificant in the immensity of the world.
Men. One man. You. You must have read my letter by now. I'm sure you feel guilty for this situation. You pace round and round our home like lion in his cage. You blame yourself for not having seen my misery earlier, for not having tried harder to help me, for not having been more present. I know you so well! I'm sorry you have to suffer. I am sorry I can't help being what I am.
I look away from the window to dispel your image.
Next to me sits a little girl of about twelve. Obviously, she travels alone. She's absorbed in the reading of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, my favorite Jules Verne book.
Then memories rush into my mind. Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver's Travels. I think they saved my life! Perhaps Captain Nemo is saving hers?
Then she chooses to become aware that I look at her. She uses her index finger as a bookmark, raises her head from her book with a satisfied sigh and genuinely smiles at me. She closes her eyes and I know that she relishes what she has just read. She looks over the words in her mind, sucks on them as a candy, and savors them like pieces of chocolate cake.
I can imagine the attack of the Nautilus by the octopus or the discovery of the city of Atlantis …
No, Nemo is not saving her life. She doesn't need it.
I let my mind wander, following the first positive thought in a long time.
I see this little girl at the end of the book, at the same time delighted by the trip she's just made and disappointed that it's already come to an end.
I imagine her in 5 years, a lively teenager. Her teachers praise her curiosity and wit. Boys are crazy for her long legs, and girls envy her thick brown curls. As for her, she'd rather have her freckles vanish; she's not a toddler anymore!
And I go on. I see her lying in the grass in a park, her head on a blonde young man's lap who devours her with his eyes. She looks over some of her notes. It will be summer soon. Exams approach. She won't fail, of course, but better safe than sorry.
The girl is now thirty and pregnant. She holds the father's child by the arm. He's not blonde, but not less handsome. They're happy. They've just learned that it's a girl.
She had always dreamed of having a daughter!
I've made great strides in time because now the little girl is all wrinkled, bent, tired. The end of her life is near but she's happy because she's about to see the man who has been out of her life for the past ten years. She also feels she's had an intense life.
The pilot announces that it's time to land. I ordinarily can't wait for the jolt of landing. But this time, I want to stop. I'd like to have more time to let a thought form in my mind.
I understand that my life was built on a misconception. Motion is not movement. Motion is the illusion of movement. Motion is the ghost of movement, an ersatz of movement. It's movement with a sweetener.
True movement means to change. It's to be a self in perpetual evolution. It's to question yourself not to question what you deeply are. It's to resolve your weaknesses and to accept to make them go away.
It's to dare to look yourself in a mirror and to admit you have a problem.
It's to grow, love, cry, suffer; it's to fall and to get up again.
To change is to live. To live is to change.
For all these years, I've been fooling myself. I've been mixing up flight and movement. The most important movement is the inner movement. My inner movement will master all those things that are driving me crazy.
Suddenly, time does not seem to pass fast enough.
As someone said: "If you want to know the value of one hour, ask a couple of lovers who wait impatiently to see each other again."
I measure the value of one hour by waiting to leave the airport to make a call.
He picks up on the first ring. I'm not even surprised, I knew it.
"I miss you," are the very first words he says to me.
"Don't worry, I'm fine. I'm changing and I'm coming home."