Anne with an e- a new version of the story

Chapter 95 - Pride in loving

ANNE

It was a lovely autumn afternoon with few clouds in the sky, and a gentle breeze playing with Anne's hair, making the girl have to adjust her red locks more often than she would have liked. She was sitting under her cherry tree like in the old days, when she would hide there to unleash her imagination and write her stories about princes and princesses, fairies and castles.

The difference now was that she was no longer that girl whose only concern was getting good grades, getting rid of her freckles, and changing the annoying color of her hair that she hated back then. She was an eighteen-year-old woman who had learned the hard way to value things like tranquility and peace of mind, and she couldn't say she had already achieved hers, but she was doing a good job trying.

Anne sighed as she remembered the foolish girl she had been for caring about such trivial things, when she could have tried harder to accept the nature of things as they were, instead of fighting against them, even knowing she had no chance of winning.

Her hair remained red, the freckles were in the same place, as for her grades, she didn't even continue studying to keep competing with her fiancé, who was by far the best student at the New York Medical School.

Anne had always known that Gilbert would thrive as a university student; he was too dedicated and intelligent for it to be otherwise. She was astonished by how easily he memorized strange and complex names in their anatomy classes, while she couldn't even spell them. One nite, she and Gilbert entered a competition to see how many literary writers and their works he could remember, and how many medical terms Anne could spell without missing a letter, and the result was that Gilbert had more literary knowledge than Anne could imagine, proving that she would have to study more medical vocabulary if she wanted to beat Gilbert next time.

However, she no longer minded losing to Gilbert in whatever it was. She was happy to see his rise in so many different areas because he deserved every success he achieved, as he worked hard and shared with Anne each step he took toward a bright future, and she, as his fiancée, always and unconditionally supported him.

As for her and her dreams, Anne was still walking at a slow pace. It was hard to return to an old routine and let life take its course without the natural anxiety she used to have about learning everything and knowing everything at the same time. She was no longer like that; she still liked to learn, had returned to being interested in books, and even started writing poems again, but she no longer had the urgency she used to, that need to race against time as if the future couldn't wait.

In all those months, she had learned that life had its own way of guiding destiny, therefore it had its own time and its own plans, and that it was of no use to run so much if in the end what remained was just exhaustion. Anne had experienced the best and the worst of both worlds, and it was up to her to choose which path she wanted to take. She had run so much and was stopped by her own limitation, she had desired so much and the only concrete thing that remained was Gilbert, and she did not intend to let him go either.

That's why she fought every day to free herself from the inertia that left her depressed, to see with optimism the fifty percent that remained for her to fulfilll her dream of becoming a mother, and to try to make plans for a future that no longer seemed so appealing.

Gilbert was the only one who wouldn't let her give up. There was a strength in him that joined hers whenever Anne thot she couldn't bear it. It was good to know that she could lean on him in her worst moments, it was good to know that his shoulder was always there when she felt her fatigue was greater than her will, it was good to know that there was a man by her side who made it worth fighting.