EDITH

Edith used to be so frightened when she was young, like a pale little ghost slipping into the shadows, hiding from her vicious elders, trying not to be noticed. I saved her once, swept her away like a prince in a fairy tale. But that was long ago and far away, and perhaps no longer mattered. How were such things counted among normal people?

A veil of time had fallen since then. Several years later, I could see she had thawed. She was no longer that frozen, scared little girl afraid to be noticed, afraid to live. Instead, over these years, she had frozen me in the past, preserved me with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament. She would dust me off from time to time and then put me back on the mantelpiece. I no longer belonged to earth or to life.

However, she was about to discover not just how distant our paths had become, but the measure of loss that would strike her—a loss she didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms, but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of the things we lost and may never have cared for.

Time passed. One Tuesday afternoon, she was weeping for an altogether different reason. She watched me dance my way down the stairs, my face filled with a grin. But she saw something else: a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for old sicknesses, maybe even a cure for her aching heart. Very good, yes. But a harsh, cruel world.

Nostalgia walked her back to when we first met, when she was a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding my arm, which she knew in her heart she could not let go of, holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what she saw. It wasn't really her, but the young her, though she still saw it and it broke her heart. She had never forgotten.

Actually, she realized that she had developed subconscious feelings for me irrespective of seeing me on a daily basis. She developed feelings not because of the way I made her feel, the way I cared for her, the way I treated her and all those moments we spent together, but because she cherished every moment we had spent together in the past. No wonder it had taken her that long for them to surface.

Maybe it was the stress, maybe it was the truth, maybe she didn't want things to turn abstract, but she felt she should say it. Because this was the moment to say it. Because it suddenly dawned on her that this was why she had nostalgia, why she couldn’t hold onto any relationship. Fate only wanted one thing from her: to tell me that I was the only person she would like to say goodbye to when she died, because only then would this thing she called life make any sense. However, she wasn't sure how I would react.

She covered her head with the hood, looked down at her dark-screened phone, and made tiny steps all the way down to her tiny hostel room.

She didn’t want to see anyone. She lay down with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over her like a sluggish wave. Whatever was happening to her was her own fault. She had done something wrong, something so huge she couldn’t even see it, something that was drowning her.

Inadequate and stupid. That's how she felt. Worthless. The pathology results had already confirmed as much, but this was different. Popular culture, she'd concluded, was a place where pity was called compassion, flattery called love, propaganda called knowledge, tension called peace, gossip called news, and auto-tune called singing. But one thing was clear: she had to decide that she was going to move on. It wasn’t going to happen automatically. She would have to rise up and say, "I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life. And that was a must."

“Everyone suffers at least one bad betrayal in their lifetime. It’s what unites us. The trick is not to let it destroy your trust in others when that happens. Don’t let them take that from you,” Natalia would advise. Edith knew that. And now she was a victim. Sarcastically, despite that being her principle, despite being toxic and cautious, she had drowned beyond rescue. Drowned in her tears. Drowned in her emotions. Drowned in her misery. It all started that Friday afternoon in Onaires pork center. Past two o’clock, most students had already served lunch and left.

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. “He looks so cool,” she murmured to herself before lifting her head once more and there he was. Though she had already found out that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around her, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with her own insignificant self; but her articles were always her friends, let fail all else, at least that’s how most of us go to know her…kk chronicles. Contrary to that, she was now vulnerable, worried that he would notice her, or her insecurity and fidgeting, but he remained oblivious and a cold loneliness enveloped her.

He stood up, dried his hands with a saviet before walking straight past her out of the café. He saw her right after he walked through the door, she seemed dressed for the sole purpose of blending in, but she stood out, anyway.

She seemed dressed for the sole purpose of blending in, but she stood out anyway. It didn’t matter that her wide brown eyes were narrowed or that her pretty mouth was twisted into a near snarl — she was blatantly beautiful. It was kind of sick the way he seemed not preoccupied with beautiful girls these days, or rather that particular day. But anyway, beauty lies on the eyes of the beholder.

He felt a little sorry for her. She seemed new or lost in ecstasy and trying hard not to look it. She was confused and trying to look tough. Endearing is what it was. Too ironic for the Edith we know.

Being a fan of the popular saying that “twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”, She had a history of making decisions very quickly about men. She had always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. She had a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential, especially the toxic, emotionally unavailable narcissistic dark engineering guys. Her banters with friends would have you thinking she wasn’t vulnerable, but in this case…let’s see.

She had fallen in love more times than she cared to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and she had hung on to relationships for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times, in romance, she had been a victim of her own optimism. What did hurt her most was that however how much she didn’t want to admit, she had fallen for this stranger. She didn’t even know his name.

She wasn’t timid, however. A few minutes later she had already caught up with him, standing before his tall handsome masculine athlete figure asking his name. He was mocking her. She could see his mouth beginning to lift in a maddening smirk, a smile that was half sardonic and half secretive, as if the fate of the world depended on the answer to a riddle only he knew and would never share.

“Let me tell you this,” he answered. “If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”

Girls being girls, she only got the part he said that he didn’t enjoy solitude, or rather that’s what she wanted to hear. She got her way. However, with time, they cultivated love and allowed her most vulnerable and powerful self to be deeply seen and known. She honored the spiritual connection that grew from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

She used to advertise her loyalty and didn’t believe that this person she loved that much would eventually betray her. What she didn’t know was that each man kills the thing he loves most, some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word, the coward does it with a kiss and the brave man with a sword.

The end was predictable. Being the selfish, impatient and a little insecure girl she was, she had made mistakes, she was out of control and at times hard to handle. But instead of apologizing, she would yell at him that if he couldn’t handle her at her worst, then he sure as hell didn’t deserve her at her best.

It was a mistake. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was hers for trusting him. Ironically, it was, and now he had left her. But she still loved him.

She knew it was easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend, and that made her spend her time hoping he would suffer the consequences for what he did to her heart. But she was only allowing him to hurt her a second time in her mind.