In the Woods When First We Met

103. The Crooked Path

On Friday morning, as she slowly awoke in her bed, she had a brief moment where she felt normal- until it hit her that her world was still in turmoil, and Billy was back at school again.

His first day back had been uneventful. He had ignored her and nothing had happened. And he had told her he'd leave her alone before.

Shouldn't that have made things okay?

But it didn't. She could not have expectations. Would the day pass by without incident, or would it be the day he changed his mind?

...It was truly exhausting to go into that building every morning worrying about him.

The fresh blanket of snow that had fallen overnight was not enough to lift her spirits. She gazed out her window in the morning and felt like a deflated balloon.

Before, the snow felt like a surprise party- although Anne had never been to one, she could imagine the breathless anticipation of it and the subsequent delight.

Now the snow seemed dreary and hopeless.

A thought, heavy as lead, dropped on her:

Winter will be such a long time...

She had thought that what had happened, bad as it was, would get better over time, like a slow and steady incline...each day getting easier, until finally things would be back to normal.

But it didn't seem to work that way. There was no straight path going up- instead, the path zigzagged and jumped up and down and threw her for a loop every day.

Whenever she had a good day, she thought happily that things were finally changing. It won't be long now, she'd thought so many times.

But then the next day, or the day after, she was at rock bottom again.

She wondered hopelessly if the rest of her life would be this way- just a spiral up and down, never knowing what the next day would be like. Ever since that day in the woods, she bounced back and forth between carefree and fearful, between hope and despair.

And even when she was calm, she knew it wouldn't last.

The eye, she remembered...

She'd read a book, once, about the tropics, and she remembered that there was something called 'the eye of the storm'.

When a storm hit, there was a brief period of time in which everything became peaceful. It was calm and quiet and still.

It was a deceptive stillness, though- it was only calm for a brief time because you were at the center of the swirling storm. You couldn't enjoy the peace, because all the while you knew that the storm was about to hit you again with full force.

That was her life now- a storm. If she wasn't in the throws of it, she was only in the eye, just waiting to get hit again by the harshness of this world.

Why won't this go away? She wondered. Will it ever go away?

She slowly got dressed and went downstairs, wanting only to crawl back under the covers and wait for spring.