I turned and walked over
to the banks of the river, leaving the forested trail behind me and watching
the roaring rapids churn, frigid with the weather. Funny how it could move
through the ice, never freezing and unable to freeze over with its motion.
Tumbling stones, tumbling rocks, tumbling anything that fell into its flow
until even the most ragged edges smoothed. Tumbling, churning, polishing over
and over again.
We’d held the funeral at
Fountain Street Church. It’s… where she’d have wanted to be, in the sacred,
peaceful halls under the watchful gaze of the Savior. She’d looked so peaceful
in her casket, as if she’d merely been sleeping and nothing more. Sleeping, and
waiting for me. Waiting, as she always would, in some other world.
It’d been hard, dealing
with the grief. It still is, to be honest. Still hard, visiting her grave and
sitting, talking as if she could talk back, remembering her laugh. We buried
her in a cemetery plot near the river. She always loved the river, the roaring
rapids. That’s why we’d moved to the apartments near the riverside. So we could
always look out, every morning, and see the river flowing past us below. She
told me once, she told me that it reminded her to always push forward, to
always keep moving ahead, never back. Cheesy, but that’s what she said.
I miss that about her.
God, I miss her. At least Dr. Rosewater, my therapist, is back in office after
the holidays. Finally, someone I can talk to and relate to, someone other than
Andrew from next door. Not that he wasn’t a nice kid, but he was hardly a
professional and he had more to worry about than my problems. Like his upcoming
MCAT in the spring, how else would he get into med school without passing that?
The kid needed to save his emotional and mental energy, not play case study
with me.
I keep up often with him
now, sending him baked goods every so often when I get the time. He probably
would appreciate them more than I would; I can’t eat them all myself…
I stoop, picking up a
small pebble, and cast it into the river’s rapids. It spins in midair, arcing,
and finally lands in the freezing waters with a soft plip. The branches on the trees behind me creaked softly, gently in
the wind. I hadn’t seen any of the demons for a week now, not hide nor hair of
any of them. The memory of them continues to horrify me, but no longer do they
follow me, tormenting me with things I can’t bear. No longer am I hunted. No
longer am I haunted by them.
Well, perhaps not quite,
I remind myself as the pill bottle rattles softly in my jacket pocket. The
little blue, oval pills did come in handy from time to time, even if I have
been doing better lately. There’s something about this park, I think, that
makes my mind return to darker places. Familiar places it shudders at going,
but still goes boldly into. Maybe my mind’s learning to cope with my anxiety,
or maybe I just want it to be so, but I swear when I walk here, the Ravens turn
to look at me every so often, as if scrutinizing me, as if they remember me.
And if I’m very quiet,
and in just the right mindset when I look into the distant trees, I swear I’ll
see a tall figure, black-clad, walking through them, or hear the distant sound
of a little girl’s laughter…
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