That Moment of Forgiveness
by: Ruth Boskovic
“At the end of the day faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don’t really expect it. It’s like one day you realized that the fairy tale might be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it might not be a castle. And it’s not so important that everything is happy ever after, just that it’s happy right now. See, once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you and once in a while people may even take your breath away.” - Unknown
'''''''''''''
The roses on the coffin are red.
I stand in the cold spring wind that shivers through the graveyard. Mud oozes up from the soft, well-groomed ground and my black heels threaten to sink in. Lizzie, the girl who has been my best friend since birth, stands beside me in silence. She had always tried so hard to keep the link between us three, but you had tried to shut her out too.
How can I say goodbye, Hannah?
I remember one summer when we were still children you came over when I was weeding the herb garden behind my house; my big old house, with its rambling rooms and odd little wings off its sides as if it had dreamed of being a bird once and then forgotten how to fly. You came dancing across the green lawn in your purple summer dress.
“Look at the roses, Kale!” you said so brightly. And then you made me pick some and bring them into the sunlit kitchen where you arranged them into a white vase and set them on the table. “Look at the color,” you said so happily. “The room is brighter already.”
When was the day, really, exactly, when we slipped apart? The day our boats passed slowly and we reached back to catch hold of each other, only to have the rope be a fingertip too short? I never thought anything would change. I somehow thought we would grow up and old together, fighting over our different worldviews and trying so hopelessly to be better then the other. I never dreamed even for a moment that you would be gone by the time we became teenagers and by the time I was in college I would have forgotten what it was like to be friends.
I don’t know when the war started. It just sort of crept up, a slow grow, like a green ivy vine growing slowly, twisting around our relationship, growing over. At first it was a joke, a small, unimportant, in fact, silly, thing. Then it became an insult on intelligence, a fight that never got worked out, a silent war over a broken promise. Then your parents had a fight with mine over something that I have never found out what it was.
It was on my eighteenth birthday when I got the phone call.
“Hannah was in a car accident yesterday.” Lizzie told me. “She’s in the hospital now. They don’t know if she’ll survive.”
It felt like being punched in the stomach. It’s been five years since the day that you told me to never speak to you again.
I didn’t, Hannah. I didn’t try anymore after that.
I saw you a few times after that. I’d see you drive by when I was out getting mail, in the streets, in the grocery store, at the town festival, but you would always turn and walk the other way. I learned to walk away before you did, because I didn’t want to feel the dagger in my chest. And funny, eventually it hurt less and less until I didn’t even think about it very much.
But that phone call, Hannah. It brought back every bitter memory that I thought I had forgotten and an immortalizing terror. You couldn’t die. You had been my best friend for years. We had grown up playing house and dolls and eating sour apples in the orchard. How do you ever forget that?
