THE ANONYMITY OF BEING
25. The Present
She floated like a ghost caught between two worlds. But instead of questioning the living and the afterlife, she vacillated between feeling nothing and feeling everything at once. She wondered if it was peaceful to drift towards the light and sink into a cosmos of what followed the unavoidable. She wondered what was beyond the light and the pearly gates. She wondered where he was... dressed as an angel with his sins cleared or burning through the ecstasy of hell's personal pleasure.
She wondered if he'd died with guilt in his heart. Was it a guilt for what he'd done or a guilt for what he would do to save himself? It was a question that could be directed at her own troubled mind. Was she guilty for what had happened or guilty for what she'd done? The contorted alleys of her conscience made it hard to walk in a straight line, creating ripples that would unbalance her with every move she made.
She was battling against a colossal force, one that wouldn't play by rules or form compromises at the desperate pleas of mercy. She didn't know if her nightmares stemmed from the shuddering thoughts of her past or the mysterious person she was now. Her mother couldn't possibly know her anymore; she was damaged to a permanent fault. Irreversible. Yet still, she was able to float into a zone where gravity became an insignificance. Bending and rolling through the sleep of her concerns, she thought about begging for an extension. She wanted more time. More time for her to be forgotten and eventually placed at the bottom of a list of priorities.
She was a burden. A burden who would only weigh down the happiness of others. The happiness of her mother...
"Bella, can you hear me?" a soft voice whispered. Bella wondered why the person sounded so worried. "Honey, you're home now. Edward carried you-"
All too soon, she felt weight being clamped onto her muscles, heartlessly throwing her out of the world she'd wanted to stay in forever. In a perplexing contradiction, as she floated higher and higher out of the bottomless chasm of her mind, more was added to her load. The heaviness grew. It was the metal armory she would need. But she didn't know if she was strong enough to wear all of it. There was a safety within the dark, effortless abyss. She understood that she couldn't be a waste of space when there was nothing around her. Its promise of automatic ignorance was tantalizing.
She could just be. Be that anonymous being who traveled aimlessly through the craters of her world, combining past and present into a future deleted.
"Sweetheart, are you awake?" the voice continued. The woman sounded heartbroken. But Bella wasn't sure who this woman was.
Slowly, light seeped in through her eyelids as she returned to a world that had demolished her with a snap of its fingers. A sharp reminder of how breakable she was; she wasn't anything special. She was just the rubble that remained. She was a ghost of what was left. Her former self was trapped under the debris of the bombing. She would've been long dead.
But the sweet voice of the woman kept trying, showing Bella that she didn't believe in her death. Her gentle cooing allowed Bella to meet the familiar eyes of her mother. They shone with a love that couldn't be drawn by a quill or printed by a typewriter.
Bella started to weep.
"I don't know what I should do as a mother," Renee whispered. "I don't know what I've done wrong, sweetheart."
She pressed a kiss on her daughter's forehead before wiping away the tears. Bella sat up, finding herself immediately leaning in for a hug. The warmth that emitted from Renee made Bella's chest hurt even more. She wasn't sure if she deserved this sort of love anymore.
"I will always love you, honey," Renee whispered. "I have been trying to help you but I don't know what to do anymore. I'm at a point where I need someone else's guidance."
Bella continued to cry, finding it hard to breathe as she trembled with a sadness that couldn't be arranged into words of the spoken language.
"... We can have sessions together, if that's what you need," Renee continued. "But if you don't want me to know what's killing you inside... you can have your own one-to-ones with the psychologist.
"Although it pains me to know that there are things you can't tell me, it's essentially not about me. It never has been. It's all about you, honey. I would do anything for you to get better. But I'm not a professional and I don't want to ruin the progress that has already been made."
As Renee held Bella closer, imitating the way she had cradled her as a baby, she was crystallized into a stalagmite of hope, yearning to reach higher and higher for a taste of a future recovered.
.
.
.