by V.J. Goll
Thirteen
When I write these next parts, we are no longer in the past quite. Yet, we are not quite yet in the future. There is more to this story than this ending. I feel that it is incomplete without telling you what happened to us afterwards.
I walked through the park looking at the frosted ground feeling a bit nostalgia. This place has brought me so many things.
"How did therapy go today?" I asked Mara. We both were healthier. This life in the north though it was cold in the winter had been kind.
"It went good," she said. She seemed lost her thoughts. Perhaps, something was weighing her down in therapy. I smiled. It was good seeing her healthy. I was patient waiting for her to speak some more words if she wanted to. It didn't matter to me. Yet, we both kept walking beside each other without saying anything. I looked away so she wouldn't be uncomfortable. It was our custom. I didn't say anything either giving her space.
"You know," I started after the silence, "we can renew our lease-"
"Ally," she said, "look at me." I knew the moment she said those words. It was something serious. I stopped walking and looked at her. She looked upset.
"Were you found out?" I asked her suddenly concerned. Did her father find her? Was he here? I felt my heart beat faster as my anxiety kicked in. I was worried now.
"It wasn't anything like that," she said to me. I could tell that she was trying to tell me something.
I felt something drop in me emotionally. I was really listening to her right now. "Then, what is it?" I said gently.
She bit her lip and looked the other way. "We can't be doing this," she said to me with her voice breaking. I could hear pain in it.
"Doing what?" I said. I was frowning. I didn't understand what she meant.
"The only thing you do is help me and others," she said with a surge of emotion, "I hardly know anything about you. I don't know what you like to do in your free time. I don't know what you like to do or what makes you happy. Everything you do is centered on taking care of me.
"Just like how you got better," I said with pain hitting me, "I can work through my issues. I can work through my problems. I don't want to lose you."
"Ally," said Mara starting to cry, "can't you see how toxic this is for you? All your life you were raised around being served and serving others. The only thing that you know how to do is to help people, but this is not helping you. Helping me is not helping you. You are just using me to run away from your problems. I can't do that to you. I can't be that selfish. One of the reasons why you are able to help to help me is because you suffer from some of the same demons yourself." I could tell those words hurt coming from her. It hurt both of us.
I nodded. I knew it was pointless to argue with her. I felt my face wet.
"I wish you the best," she said gently. I could tell she was restraining herself. I knew she wanted to comfort me, but we both had to stop.
"I wish you the best, too," I said to her, "you are doing the right thing." She nodded and turned away. I saw her walking away. I swallowed my pain and held back the tears as I walked the other way. No one warns you about the emptiness that comes after you are done with these kinds of things. No one tells you about how your life loses direction or about how the exhaustion that you somehow did not feel. It just hits you and leaves you like a dead weight. The truth is the verdict of the choices that I made. It was a horrible decision, but it was a good decision. I came to terms with my childhood and the caregiving struggle. I was suffocated with being taken care of and having to take care of others. I couldn’t start being a person till Mara left.
That night I went to sleep I had a weird dream. I was on Grandfather’s farm. He had a small vineyard that he never made wine from again when he changed. I went to it. I saw myself as a young child wearing overalls and a long shirt to protect me from the farm. I went to the vineyard expecting to see bright purple grapes, but I saw thorns. They had wrapped around destroyed the grapes. They wrapped around the posts that sometimes reminded me of a cross. These thorns tended to suck the water from the ground and kill everything. I was sad. Without thinking, I had something in my hand. I looked, and it was a knife. I cut the thorns in anger for killing the grapes. They crinkled and died. I saw grape shoots start forming from the ground. The destruction beginning life anew. Then, I woke.
He did not want to stay here. It was moot being around this area. His life dragged with neuropsychological evaluations and empty conversations with people. They did not have weight. He hated it. He hated how everyone was ignoring the problems. He was filling out pieces of paperwork for children's lives, and no one was really following it. No one cared. He was starting not to care.
He went home as he always done. He looked at his library whimsically. It was an empty house. His parents and colleagues asked him to date other people, but the conversations were the same. Everyone wants to change something. He thought about her stubbornness. He thought about her passion. She cared too much. He missed that. He missed caring.
Taking himself from his slump, he made dinner. It was a chicken mozzarella combination that didn't quite taste right to him. He knew that he liked the garlic flavor. The white wine that he matched it with was okay. This was the golden handcuffs of the south. You can have everything.
Except her. He sighed. He had been too passive. He was too scared. What was he afraid of? Missing opportunities? He pulled his laptop out of his bag and opened it again. He modified his resume and clicked submit. He wasn't going to avoid her anymore. He wanted to see her.
It didn't take long to hear the callback from the hospital the next week. They chatted. It was a cordial conversation of interest. He had received an offer for an interview. "Allison," he said. She was wearing light blue scrubs that was typical of the OR. She looked at him. There was look of surprise on her face.
They met at the small coffee shop with chalked up walls and small round black tables. It was a provocative place.
"How did you find me?" She asked. Ravi watched her carefully. Her expression was one that she expected to be found. It was almost relieved that this was the way she was found.
"I looked the wrong way," he said quietly, almost meekly, "then, I realized that you weren't trying to be angry. You were trying to heal."
"You always had a habit of doing that," she said to him. She was ribbing him softly. This was a good sign.
He sighed. He didn't know why he sighed. He shoved it off as the complicated thoughts sigh. “Thank you for meeting me,” said Ravi. Ally just looked at him with a small smile.
“I always have time for old friends,” she said. Life had aged her. She was no longer the youth that used to sit before him with so much light for the future. She seemed tired and more docile than she used to be.
“It is just,” he paused, “I have been running over everything in my head from back then. I wanted to show you this." She looked at him in his suit frowning. She didn't know what it was. He pulled out a pile of papers. It was a manuscript.
"It is not long enough to be a book," she said to him. He could tell she was disappointed at the manuscript. She frowned. Later, she would tell him about the dream with the vineyards.
"This is a case brief, Allison," he said to her eagerly, "you simply put together everything on your own. This explains the whole situation. It explains how you got involved. It explains how you knew about it. It is to set you free. It is not right what they did and what you had to do to survive."
She looked at him silently.
"It is only supposed to give enough facts to help people understand the situation," he said to her, "what do you want to call it?"
She looked sad. "The Briers," she said, "call it the Briers for it was a situation that was thorny and grew of control in a place of vineyards, but had thorns instead."
He nodded writing in the title on the top of the page.
"Why did you do this?" she asked him.
"Allison," he said. He could see some hurt in her eyes, but she accepted the name
. Childhood was gone. She was a person. She was no longer a child dressing as an adult. Adulthood clothed her. Ravi felt conflicted with his analytical nature. He wanted to build a bond.
"Why?" She asked him. It was a difficult question. He felt sad. People had been cruel.
"I like you," he almost blurted. He felt like he was two years old expressing the emotion. He wasn’t good with it. It was a weird thing. They did not have a huge age gap.
"You had to make some hard choices to help yourself," he said to her, "I want to help you."
"They were bad choices," she said. She looked away.
"Was anyone helping you? You had two options: survive or succumb. You picked to survive. When you got shoved against the wall, you choose to preserve," said Ravi, "if people had been willing to help you. If you had help and structure to get out of your environment, then, yes, it was wrong, but you had nothing back then. You should forgive yourself for this. I am sorry people are not compassionate. I am sorry that people are fast to judge. I am sorry that you got hurt when you tried to help, but, most of all, I am sorry that you won't forgive yourself. Let yourself move on. You are lingering in this stasis because you are waiting to be validated. No one is going to validate you. They won't get your pain. They won't understand you. Only you can validate and understand yourself. This can help you heal."
"Obscurity is a terrible thing," she said to Ravi tiredly, "it is horrible thing to suffer something bad and not be righted. I thought to myself, 'maybe if I just let it go, it will be alright.' People's actions have haunted me. They have influenced my small things and the way that I see people. I realized that I was always afraid. I never let go of the fear. It has stayed with me. I am never heard."
He looked at her sadly. "Have you been haunted by the past?" he asked her gently. His voice was lower than usual. There was a sick irony to all of this. She helped someone with PTSD, but there was no one to help her. There was no one to understand her. He knew because he watched carefully on the first day that she took the test. He saw it. She struggled between who she was and who she became. Some people might think it is minor but imagine your whole future was decided with one label. Imagine your whole life that you lived in fear that if you did something stupid. You wouldn't have a second chance. It was it, a final outcome. There was no changing the circumstances. There was no future. She lived without a future. She lived without thinking of marrying, buying a house, and having children. Those thoughts never crossed her mind because society hasn't really told her that she could have it. It was a cruel equilibrium. She was stuck between battling the consequences, not her disabilities, but the consequences of her disabilities and battling for survival. Not once, she had relaxed since he knew her. He could tell that she was always worried. She was always afraid. Life taught her to fear. He wanted so badly to show her a future.
"Allison," he said to her, "look." He pointed to the television. She looked at the news. It registered in her eyes what happened. The things that was left unresolved were resolving. It was something about a religious man being arrested for sexual abuse of a child, a scandal was breaking out in a mega church. There was talk about the pressure that is used on individuals with disabilities in the south to discourage academic goals. She smiled in bittersweet manner. She had a future now. They haven't won. Their power existed off the fact that no one paid attention. He paid attention. He knew. He heard her. Her voice was not silenced. Mara’s voice is not silenced. This made her smile for the first time.
“Let yourself have a future,” he said to her gently sliding her the manuscript, “please consider it.”