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I never expected to feel joy again after the land mine. Sometimes, when I watched Olivia’s face, when I saw how relaxed she had become, my heart brimmed over. She was so full of hope that perhaps her illness would evaporate like the morning mist of the Adriatic Sea as the sun burns through.
Every now and then, I’d catch the briefest glimpse of something else in that morning mist. Anya. It was almost as if some thread of Anya, her very essence, survived that explosion in the forest. That, somehow, she has reached across time and space to reassure me that, although she still loved me, it was okay for me to be happy with this other woman. As if Anya loved me so much that she was blessing my life with this new, slightly broken woman, Olivia. As if she wanted me to help heal Olivia, if I could, in a way that I couldn’t heal Anya.
So many people died in the war. So many survivors, like me, do our best to carry on without the ones we loved. Without the neighbors who lived down the street in our childhoods, without the smiling face of the lady who sold tomatoes in the town market, of the young man studying to become a doctor but became a dead soldier instead. The innocence and wonder of our prewar lives had been destroyed, never to return.
We all kept carrying on the best we could, at first going through the motions of just getting through a minute, an hour, a morning, an afternoon, and hardest of all, the long, dark night.
After years of stumbling through life, dead on the inside, I decided to move to a faraway place in the forest, where no one knew much at all about the war that destroyed my soul, so many souls. Then one day, on a long, grueling hike up a steep mountain trail, when I allowed memories of Anya to seep back into my consciousness, I began to come back to life. For the first time since the land mine, I cared about something.
I cared about Olivia, the strong and courageous and, unknown to me, wounded woman I followed up the steep trail.
I’d never forget Anya. I’d be on alert for those golden threads of Anya to reach across time and space to embrace me, and when they do, I will cherish them and her, and be forever grateful.
