When I needed to push myself, I did. But when I needed to relax... apparently, I couldn't. After the incident, tension became my second nature and didn't leave me until I met Her! Yes, Her. Again!
She appeared out of nowhere and flooded me with the noble beauty of falling in love.
Not that I asked for it, not that I wanted it, it just happened. Not that it happened immediately. She took me to a plane I didn't know existed. She turned my world view upside down and dragged me into a strange state of mind. It wasn't just mental, it was physical. She didn't just drag me into thoughts, but yanked me out of my almost gray everyday life and thrust me into a colorful dimension hidden from everything and everyone. But was it hidden, or just hard to reach? Was it for everyone or just the chosen ones? Was it knowledge or a surprising burst of recognition that there exists another reading, another view of history and present.
She stunned me with what I thought was fiction or perhaps conspiracy, but ultimately turned out to be just a well-concealed present and a past masterfully veiled through distorted interpretations of facts.
Yes, she broke me. But that came later.
First, she conquered me, captivated me, pulled me away from everything, re-educated me, sculpted me, and recreated me anew, so I could fit into her reality, or rather fit into the reality where she existed.
I was just another child left parentless due to an accident.
The peculiar thing here was that I was part of the accident, and even if I close my eyes and dismiss the self-deceptions embedded in my memories, I could say that I didn't just participate in the accident, but I was one of the guilty ones.
No, let's not fool myself, I was the guilty one.
If I hadn't demanded attention, if I had let my father drive peacefully...
Maybe he would have noticed the deer charging onto the road, maybe he would have managed to react in time, and maybe my mother and he would have succeeded in teaching me to swim in the lake as planned.
I was an impudent kid who wanted his way, even if I didn't deserve it, but I wanted it. This damn stubbornness of mine, or maybe not?
But I had to ask, had to point, and they had to see and explain to me. I screamed, perhaps too loudly, but I was shocked. The sight of the droplet that fell and from which She emerged... they hadn't seen it!
How?
And I had to ask, I had to. I watched her and shouted. I even pointed at her.
And she watched me. She saw me and smiled. She was surprised.
The huge deer flew into the car through the front window, crushed my father's chest, and my mother ended up with an antler in her throat.
The unforgivable part was that I got away with just a slight bump to my head against the front seat.
But the crushing part of the shock that came later was witnessing my father's last breath and his accusing gaze, easily read in his unseeing blue eyes.
My mother's blood was on me. I still feel it.
Since then, I've been dreaming of her too.
Back then, my eardrums had burst violently with pain from the pressure change and then again. There were no wails, moans, or noise. Silence filled my consciousness.
The doctors said my brain had shut down perceptions to protect itself, but I'm not sure. Why then did I hear the drops of leaking fuel on the asphalt? Why did I hear the crackling of sparks? Why did I hear the hissing of the appearing flame...
How did I get out of the car? That I couldn't explain to the police officers who questioned me later.
I also couldn't explain why I was holding a piece of deer antler in my hand.
The car was burning, and I sat on a rock, staring at the river beside the road.
People came, brakes screeched, I heard shouts and the furious hissing of fire extinguishers battling the flames.
I don't know who lifted me up or who later wrapped me in a blanket. What nonsense! Summer, and they're wrapping me in a blanket!
I remember the back seat where they laid me down and the water bottle that was thrust into my hands. Then the ambulance siren.
So I could hear. My brain hadn't shut down. But everything felt like a movie. A well-shot one. But it didn't touch me... not then.
After that, I blacked out, have no memories. Everything turned gray with these gray waves between which some colored pictures tried to emerge, but they couldn't quite make it.
I could sense. I could hear, but I wasn't processing what was happening around me.
I understood I was in some house, but not mine. They took me to some school, but not my school. Some kids tried to connect with me, I even got into fights. Ambitious teachers tried to pour knowledge into my head, then later check if it was still there. Gray. In waves. Waves and colored pictures. My father's eyes kept appearing.
Another teacher's attempt to get me interested in what they were teaching. Another time standing in front of my classmates, and once again, I went down the path of desperate efforts to push away the grayness and find a colored picture with the teacher or at least the sound of his words from the previous lesson. It didn't work out.
This time I lost my way. I hit a wall. The wall of her eyes.
I was looking out the window, trying to ignore my classmates' mockery and the unspoken "this idiot..." on their lips.
The green in the grass was beautiful, the small leaves beginning their journey toward maturity on the bushes right below the window were captivating, but what caught my eye and brought back the colored pictures of my memories was Her.
She stood there among the bushes, visible from the last window of the classroom. She was looking at me and smiling with that same smile from before the deer and the crash.
Her green eyes caught my gaze and wouldn't let go, lightning flashed in my mind, and my mouth began repeating the sounds emerging from the thunder of my memories about the lesson.
I felt light and dizzy at the same time. I felt liberated.
I confidently repeated what the teacher had said a week ago. There were markers floating up in the form of underlined lines from textbook pages. I read those too.
Then came some conclusion that maybe had occurred to me when I was reading or underlining these pages... I don't know.
Then questions followed. I answered. The ease with which I recalled the knowledge and it appeared surprised even me. Of course, it surprised the teacher too.
Then She disappeared after a slight nod and a promise in her eyes.
I returned to the room, but the waves of grayness stayed in the past. I was whole and I knew.
Somehow I remembered everything and used everything with ease. My thoughts became structured and organized. Gone was the ocean raging with empty words and absurd thoughts existing for their own sake. I was organized and precise. That's how I answered.
Was it pride I saw in the eyes of the man who had been trying to teach me history for months? Or was it a slight accusation?
The mockery remained in the children's eyes before me, but I couldn't expect it to disappear. They grasped things slowly and hardly understood what I was saying.
Physics was next – a subject I didn't understand. At least until now.
Before that, during the break, came the headache, then the shadow of some muscular thug trying to get to me somehow. Fog and insignificance. I ignored him. As always.
The old man had been teaching physics since the ancient times of the school's founding. I knew this for certain because I remembered the foundation plaque and the photo of a grinning young man in a toga, with the old man's name below. This was him from the time when the first class graduated from the institution I was attending.
The old man had lost the spark in his eyes, tired of looking for talents in his subject. He had been overtaken by the ordinary and had abandoned his youthful naivety that he would give something to the generation that would launch them toward knowledge about atoms, their nuclei, and perhaps relativity, gravity, and time.
The tedium of having to test me because it was my turn in the grade book was implicit. He had no expectations other than seeing me in summer school. I hadn't given him any reason until now to think differently.
I wanted to please him with my answer to his question, moved by the timelessness that had taken over his eyes. A simple question leading to an apparently elementary answer, yet concealing references to discoveries and unsolvable mysteries.
The proof wrapped in axioms remained unverified, and these axioms were accepted as such due to lack of explanation and vision for alternatives. I knew this was wrong. I sensed that the reasoning should take a different direction, and the plane of problem expression should be interpreted differently.
I told him so and explained. Then I clarified and began substantiating my thesis about the vision of difference.
I spoke at length, and wrote on the blackboard even longer. I stumbled a bit while drawing a diagram that occurred to me as the easiest way to illustrate my thoughts. Then I probably went overboard developing an easily provable thesis that had just come to mind, but I continued.
The empty space on the blackboard ran out. I mechanically started erasing the beginning, ignoring the wails and firm protests behind me.
Soon I finished, grinning that I had managed to prove part of my thesis, but somewhat worried about stopping in the void regarding my general conclusion. But I couldn't see any chalk to continue with.
I was rubbing my hands in a miserable attempt to get rid of the chalky dust clinging to my palms.
I didn't dare wipe them on my pants, knowing what the result would be in the hallway after class.
It was quiet again, deafeningly so. I had made a mistake somewhere. I looked back at my writing. Checked it in my head. No, I hadn't made a mistake on the board. I had confused the time. I had missed the year and became flustered. I was fifteen years old, and I wasn't expected to explain my thoughts using mathematical symbols unknown to teenagers. But there was no other way. I couldn't describe what I wanted with simple mathematical expressions. I had resorted to knowledge I hadn't yet acquired.
Come to think of it, I had described methods that hadn't been discovered yet, or had I just discovered them? But how could I express myself then?
I acted like a true fifteen-year-old caught masturbating by his mother in the living room. I simply took my backpack timidly and left the room.
How convenient it was to sit at the desk next to the door. The silence and a quiet, lonely, whispering, repetitive "But, but..." in the old man's voice saw me off into the corridor's noise.
The class had ended sometime, but who cared. I didn't want to stay.
I didn't want to waste more time, nor did I want to rekindle youthful enthusiasm in my mathematics and chemistry teachers, whose classes were coming up.
Or had they already passed. I don't know!
The expectation in Her eyes, the promise in them made me hop on my bicycle and frantically pedal toward an old bridge outside town.
Why there? Well, I wasn't sure. Maybe she had nodded in that direction, or perhaps I just knew she would wait for me there.
The wind brought tears to my eyes, and the dust it carried grated in my mouth.
The bridge appeared, and then I crossed it.
Something pushed me slightly backward, but I strained and kept my balance.
The eardrums in my ears popped from the changed pressure, and I fell onto the grass where the road ended.
There should have been asphalt! The grass should have been green! But everything was gray.
Damn it, gray again! But different and not in my head. Everything there was fine and colorful, but my eyes showed grayness in all its degrees possible to the eye.
Confusing, but She was there.
She stood upright in all her feminine splendor before me, barely three steps away.
She was smiling.
Her smile was beautiful, and her hair magnificent. Her gray dress swayed around her hips in the light breeze. One hand casually resting on her hip perfectly complemented the harmony of dozens of jingling metal bracelets on her right arm.
"I waited long."
"So did I."
"I'm not to blame for the delay."
"Neither am I."
"I'm sorry."
"For what? For now or for what happened a year ago."
"For both."
She gestured invitingly.
"Leave the bike."
I stood up, leaving the bicycle untouched.
"Are you coming?"
"Where?"
"We can't stay here much longer. The window is shrinking and the field will shut down. Are you coming?"
The bike remained there on the grass, and I followed her. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I didn't know what I was getting into. Or perhaps more correctly, I don't know what I got into a year ago when I smiled at her and heard her "Hello" in my head.
And how had I answered her then?
The End.