It's difficult to find the way everything fits into place once it's broken, even if a surgeon gives you a pretty significant first push. Alexia's recovery is progressing with hope. Her knee is responding well to rehabilitation, but she doesn't feel...
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Week 7
Alexia's POV.
'If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.'
I had heard those same words many times. I had integrated them into my way of seeing everything. I liked to think that everything described by those who claimed to have experienced it was true, as if it were a religion, with the blind faith of someone who wants to believe.
And yet, even when I had found myself in a stable, long, and pleasant relationship, though I was happy, I hadn't felt it. I had loved many people, deeply, I would dare to say I had come to love and even lose, but I would never have written a letter like Saint Paul's, the one read to all lovers at the altar just before taking the leap. Now I think maybe they don't feel that way either, because I could have married someone at some point, thinking that what I felt was the deepest possible love. I would never have composed a song like "Don't Cry" by Guns N' Roses if the supposed love of my life had left me, nor would I have centered my life around becoming someone deserving of her, like Fitzgerald and his Great Gatsby. I thought of it as poetic licenses, hyperboles of reality.
It felt strange to think that I had entered that bar with my eyes already fixed on hers. Mía was the first thing I saw when I walked through the door, and without fully understanding why, seeing her again and again became a necessity that I couldn't comprehend, because what I felt inside was completely different from everything before. Something unrelated to choice and reason, for a complete stranger. And on that night when I had approached to make up for my rudeness, I knew it for the first time.
It was completely different, feeling what all those artists describe about that first encounter, that moment of realization when you know. And I would have respected, endured finding her and her not being for me, the sentence of perhaps not having searched hard enough: never having her; but not that she would laugh at me like that, play with me. I had another great love in my life, one that I was distancing myself from and losing focus on, one that would never do that to me, take advantage of me until she got something worthwhile and then cast me aside without hesitation. If I had already given up on her at the moment I thought there was no reciprocity, I wouldn't cling now that I knew the doubts I had about it were just a sham. Screw her.
I cursed as I readjusted the bag on my shoulder, my gaze fixed on the ground. I wasn't going to let her ruin my life any further. Goodbye, and that's it. I hoped I wouldn't see her more than strictly necessary, and I would do everything in my power to avoid having to endure her presence for another minute.
