It was an insensitive spring that year. Coming early and with full force, insensible to the pain she was still working on healing, a spring with so much color, such intensity, such undeniably force that she had no other choice than to accept the fact that time indeed was rushing past her, contrasting the silent and colorless suffering inside of her.
She was at the lake again, she didn't know why.
She hadn't come here at first. It was a hated place in the first period of rage and confusion and hurt that she felt. Then it became a silent companion in her quest to understand a mind she knew she probably never would.
Being able to come here was the first steps of acceptance. Not of forgiving but rather of forgetting, ironic as it was that she could best do that there, where everything reminded her of him.
It was a feat she had accomplished slowly and painstakingly. Something she could be proud of. It was proof that she could be well, she could be sane and balanced and even happy, though happiness nowadays seemed to be more of a quiet sense of calmness.
This whole process started out as vengeance. As if proving him wrong, as if embracing the state that made it impossible for her to connect with him would make him seem worthless and small.
She gave up eventually trying to prove all that, realizing she wouldn't truly be over everything until she didn't need the feel for vengeance anymore.
She eventually got to that point.
It was right about the time when she realized she had really lost him.
She spent days thinking about what she really lost. What he really meant. It was strange how every time she tried to remember this phase, this time in her life with him, it felt like a blur, like a restless dream. She wondered whether he was really and genuinely something she loved and needed. Or just someone, like he said, who had been marked with the same unsettling burden she had been.
She took her pills, at first not out of conviction but because her family persuaded her. At first she felt no change at all, no life filling that emptiness inside of her that had been created by the loss. But then it started, as slowly and as unnoticeably as everything happened in life.
It was a process. A process that resulted in her gaining a slightly new perspective every day. Up until the day when she realized she was back to her oddly familiar and comfortable self. That self that seemed to be her epitome. That hated and boring, but at the same time real self, the one her body and soul found its way back to, having been given the chance to.
From that place everything seemed different. That whole fall and winter and the time even before. As though she were looking back on another life, another person, something she had less and less connection to everyday. It was a strange, dream like memory of someone she knew she was but couldn't quite channel anymore.
And this is how, eventually, he became this dreamlike figure. Someone for whom she couldn't feel hurt or hatred or even love anymore. Just an ill defined shape of memories and pictures that felt oddly distant and close at the same time. Something that she eventually made peace with.
And maybe that's why she could stand going to that place. It wasn't the same place she saw in her memories of him. It was like going back to a place of your childhood, where everything seems a little different, a little smaller, a little less colorful and magical and more simple, than the place in your mind.
She stood there watching the scenery that did in fact seem less loud, less grandiose, less intensive.
She thought of him and remarked with a sort of acceptance how much more difficult it was to recall his face, his voice, his gestures. Or his deeds. Somehow this is what helped her deal with the unpredictability of all that had happened. As every twist of events grew harder to recall, the less unbelievable it seemed. The less the explanations missed from the picture.
She never quite figured it all out.
She eventually pieced the puzzles together. How he must have found out one way or the other how she had ended up unstable again. How he did find out didn't really make a difference. And perhaps she was protecting herself for not wanting to know.
She also didn't know his reaction. Was he mad because he realized that what he loved and held on to didn't really exist at all and was only a result of a mind sick and suffering? Or was it that he thought he was the reason for the disease itself? The one pushing her to not be well, like her mother believed.
It was days and weeks and months of pondering that made her realize it didn't really make a difference. The reason didn't matter, only the result, only his choice. And knowing the reason behind it might have made it easier to understand but certainly not easier to accept.
Accepting was a whole different process that she had to go through, something that eventually became analogue to her process of finding her way back to herself.
Standing on the shore of that lake now, all these thoughts rummaging through her head, she realized she had arrived. At the end of that process.
How did she know that?
Was it the lack of unbearable pain that she felt when she thought of all this? Was it her confidence that no matter what had happened, it would still enable her to go on and move forward? Or was it the strange discovery that she did want to go on and move forward?
She smiled a wry smile feeling the warm spring breeze caress her face.
Perhaps it was all of those things. Perhaps it was something completely different, something unexplainable, ungraspable and unexpected.
Like most of the great things in life are.