Lucy realized that she had begun cutting down on her groceries way too early. She found her stash of canned and frozen food alarmingly low, not to mention her too-low stack of cash. So she and Keisha planned to go to remedy both those situations on Sunday, as she was also in the same boat. But, as much as Lucy loved the beautiful rainy weather, it did not seem like a good idea to be walking through the rain with themselves as well as the groceries. So they opted for Monday, a much better plan since they would be finishing rounds early and she could spend the rest of her Sunday afternoon gaming with her brother. It was one of the few things she found that was keeping her sane. Constant messaging her sister back and forth, sharing the trauma from the novels her sister recommended to her, calling her parents and gaming whenever she could with her brother. That constant, reassuring rope holding her steady to her family played a major role in why she was not a depressed sobbing mess on the floor of her room every night.
She realized that the first time she travelled, around the time of the Adam era, she always had this hole in her chest when she was alone. She filled it with music in her eardrums and fantasies about Adam on a daily basis. Afterward, when her brain could no longer remind her of the reality of her loneliness, she would slip into oblivion until the next morning.
It was only when she had time apart from Adam and returned from her country, that she recognized the hole. She only saw it because she was consciously trying to not think of Adam. From the time she realized that he never liked her. But she had been down this road before and was not going to explore it again. She wasn't that stupid.
It did not stop her from thinking about Adam randomly throughout the day. It was not the obsessive, infatuation or yearning that she had last year. It was more like a dull, constant awareness of him. She did not like it. Especially when she had gone to that hospital that he was now working at to get her evaluation from another doctor. The one that did not believe in gloves when handling the patient's testicles. She thought about him the whole way there, even through the stifling heat and sweat trickling down her belly in this infernal taxi.
Luckily for her, she did not have to endure facing him since the consultant signed and returned her evaluation form. While she waited, she saw one of the other doctors on her previous surgery firm, Dr. Prince. He was a tiny, adorable doctor who seemed to work very hard and had an extremely pleasant attitude. In fact, he was the one who encouraged Lucy to stop standing in the corridor waiting for him and just go to him to get the form signed. She noticed that he stood in the doorway and felt him listening to her tell the consultant that she had only come to the hospital for him to sign the form since she was really on another rotation in a different hospital. She vaguely wondered if he was Adam's friend and was listening for him. Or maybe he was just listening for himself. Nevertheless, she had not imagined his ears literally pricking up when she began speaking. He listened to every word and then left the room when Lucy had finished.
Interesting.
When she returned to her hall and took a blissfully cold shower, she lay on her bed and decided to meditate. She listened to one of those YouTube videos that helped you meditate yourself into a warrior.
"You are strong and ..."
She listened to the words, digested them and let the alpha waves sink into her blood, her very bones. She felt them vibrate along her skin and felt the vibrations from the tip of her toes to the crown of her head. Like a gentle caress of fingers, almost leaving gooseflesh in their wake. She remembered another form of meditation that she used to do on a daily basis but stopped for quite a few months: Praying the rosary. She used to pray it everyday, in this order: Monday and Saturday were the Joyful mysteries, Tuesday and Friday were the sorrowful mysteries, Wednesday and Sunday were the Glorious mysteries and Thursday was the Luminous mysteries. It would normally take her about 2-minutes and she would be in a deep state of meditation all the while, imagining each mystery as they played out in her head.
Today, she wanted to get back into that practice, but she decided to do it a bit differently. Instead of praying five decades dedicated to one set of mysteries, she would split the rosary up into all four mysteries. She calculated that 20 mysteries over 50 beads meant that she could pray each mystery over two beads, except for the sorrowful mysteries, which she would pray over 4 beads each, which she figured was best since they required deeper meditation.
So she began.
She let that light wave of exhaustion help serve her into sinking more and more into her subconscious mind as she prayed. She reached the last sorrowful mystery. Jesus had died on the cross. His breathed his last breath after the famous declaration "It is finished!"
Lucy saw his head hung low, heard Mary's cry, saw the dark clouds around him...
The loudest crack Lucy had ever heard in her life sounded at the same time a blinding white light flashed in her room. She was so deep into meditation that when her eyes flew open she just knew her soul tried to leave her body in that instant. A mere two seconds later, the loudest thunder Lucy had ever heard in her twenty-five years of life, boomed in the sky. Lucy was stunned. She felt like she could not have even moved if she wanted to. As much as she appreciated and even delighted in thunder and lightning, this was a lot. When she realized that there may be another flash on the way, she leapt out of her bed and slammed the windows closed.
Every cell in her body was alive. She felt life vibrating through her entire body and had to pace or she just may have exploded. For fear of another flash of that lighting blasting through her room, she tugged the curtains closed and she continued to pace.
"Father that was amazing!" she kept saying over and over again. She knew it was God, because the rest of the sky seemed to begin clearing up almost immediately. The timing was incredible. Right at Jesus's crucifixion, it was said that the earth shook and was cloaked in darkness at the time of Jesus's death. Some accounts even say there was a crack of lightning, claiming that it was to kill all our sins that Jesus took into his body...for our sakes.
She wondered if it was God's way of approving of the way she chose to pray the rosary. Or was it her decision only moments before praying to be a warrior instead of a victim.
Maybe it was both.
