And one day, he just showed up, just like that, suddenly, after almost two years of absence. After almost two years of not knowing if he was dead or alive. She was on her way to school, in a hurry as usual, and wearing a skirt that had no more room in it to fit another wrinkle. She was opening the front door and almost fainted when she saw him walking through the front gate.
Dear God! What had happened to him? He looked emaciated! Gaunt and with deep crevices on his face; crevices that reminded her of a dry and lifeless river basin which had been neglected by mother nature for decades. Crevices that seemed to have been carved deeply on each side of his mouth to reveal the depth of his sorrow.
And his eyes! Sunk, lost and obscure, and with the vacant expression of those whose souls had been broken after having gone through an extreme and unbearable torment; those whose minds had sailed through the treacherous and unforgiving sea of madness.
He was the shadow of the man she remembered. He looked even shorter, as if the suffering he had endured had forced him to hunch over in an effort to protect himself from the unrelenting sordid pain that kept ravaging his being. He was a different man. A specter of the tall and strong man he had been. A specter of the man she had loved so much.
After he closed the gate, he turned around and managed to smile at her, and she could see that it was a feeble attempt of his to connect with her. But she couldn’t reciprocate. She was angry, very angry at him.
So, they just stood there without saying a word, sort of petrified, and not knowing what to do next; not knowing how to control a primal, ancestral urge to lose each other in a long overdue embrace. An overdue embrace that neither her anger nor his sorrow would permit it to happen. Not yet anyway.
The love between the two of them had been deep-rooted, so standing there, face to face without being able to look into each other’s eyes was breaking their hearts all over again. And the formidable pain that had accumulated during those two years of not seeing each other, of not knowing if they were going to see each other again, had just surfaced with the force of a tempest leaving them utterly vulnerable, utterly exposed.
The gesture that preceded their embrace took her by surprise when she noticed that, somehow, she was afraid of him. And how could she not have been afraid? Since she felt she was hugging a virtual stranger!
When they finally surrendered to an embrace, it was a brief one. It was a brief one because they realized that fleeting as it was, that embrace had exacerbated the invisible lacerations they could no longer ignore. When they pulled apart, she couldn’t think of anything else to say, other than she was on her way to school and running late.
While closing the gate, she lowered her eyes and noticed how embarrassingly wrinkled her skirt was! And in that instant, she had to accept, with aching sorrow, that her skirt was, at that precise moment, a metaphor for her life, untidy, messy and a profound source of embarrassment.
At a deeper level, she had to accept, also, that his long unjustified absence had left her at the mercy of a cruel world. A cruel world that ignored and mocked those whose vulnerability had become, all of a sudden, exposed.
On her way to school, she cried. She cried in silence unable to control the painful sobs. Unable to control the painful sobs that were causing the core of her being to quiver. Unable to control the painful sobs that had accumulated in her heart during his two years of absence and now, with the furor of a no longer dormant volcano, were shaking her whole being, her whole world.
She knew that she would never be able to take the image of that man out of her mind. She knew that she would never be able to erased that image of defeat and alienation. That image of untamed sorrow.
The image of that strange man, who had suffocated and gotten rid of this other man, whom she had learned to love ever since she remembered. That other man, who with the patience of a saint, had taught her to ride a bicycle. That other man, who had sat by her bedside, countless times, whenever an asthma episode rendered her almost lifeless and, who, in a soft, soothing voice, had told her, while caressing her hair, about enchanted forests and the tiny magical creatures that lived in it camouflaged in the dense foliage
That man, who had come back today into her life transformed into a total stranger after two years of absence. Two years during which neither she nor her mother knew what had become of him. Two years without knowing if they were going to see him again.
Before crossing the street to her school’s entrance, she turned around to look back, as she did when she had those haunting nightmares where a sinister stranger dressed in black hastened his pace to try to get her.
She turned around one more time, to realize that this time, it was not a nightmare. This time, it was not a nightmare but real life catching up to her. Real life bringing back, from the past, someone she had loved with all her heart; bringing back someone, who had deceived her and abandoned her. Bringing back someone, who had conceived her and whom she had, once, called, dad.
Suzanna is a published poet and writer. After the tragic death of her youngest son, she published, in 2021, a memoir, “This is your story, Spin,” in English and Spanish. Suzanna can be contacted at [email protected].
