The Woman My Grandmother Loved.

Chapter Twenty-eight

"Grow old with me.
The best is yet to be,
The last of life,
For which the first was made."

Robert Browning.

September 1979

The southern Belgian town of Torgny is said to be one of the most beautiful towns in the country. A picturesque little village located in the Gaume region and surrounded by France on three sides.

A tired-looking thirty-three-year-old woman had first found her way to the village looking for a reprieve from the pace of life and she had found it. Months after arriving at the place; the color in her cheeks had returned, the gaunt look in her eyes had faded and she appeared much well-rested.

She spoke a fair bit of French though it differed from the way the natives spoke in the region; it was enough to get by. And every day without fail, tucking her hair into a bun, pulling and severing the wayward strands of hair, she walked out to the nearby school where she taught.

She didn't plan on staying there for long for vacations aren't forever. She doesn't want to make this little break stale and wants to keep this place fresh in her memory; she wants to be able to come back over and over again to the place.

On a bright Tuesday, there is nothing extraordinary. It is three o'clock in the evening and she is returning home. She doesn't have a lot of friends there and she doesn't berate herself for it. She is transient here and she is content with her transience. She wants to watch, observe and calm herself with whatever little rhythm her life sets into without demanding that it turn a particular way. She has demanded a lot from life and for now, she just wants to watch it flow. And that is what she has been doing. She does make the local people a fair bit curious for she is reclusive even with her colleagues.

It is in stark contrast to who she truly is as a person but for this little while, she enjoys being this new person. It gives her a different perspective; an outsider's point of view and she feels it helps her understand people better. A little while later, she knows she will begin missing who she used to be.

Then she will pack her bags and return to where she came from; she hopes she will be happier. But right now, there is soreness and she doesn't seek to fight it. It must be felt and accepted.

Dressed in her trademark pair of jeans and a loose sweatshirt, a minimalistic appeal in stark contrast to the vivid colors of the decade before her; Becky has become different.

Yet in so many ways, she is still the same.

There are lines appearing on her still youthful face. She is beautiful but not in the insistent and vociferous appeal of the twenty-two-year-old woman she once was. She is beautiful; the calm and subtle beauty that age brings with it. She does not have the impatience and drive that she once did, it has been replaced by the wisdom that nine years has brought along with it. And she is grateful for most of the things that her life has brought forth in these nine years.

The scars that Jeremy left behind would always be with her but she is learning to heal from them. She is learning to let go of Anita too, though she doesn't plan on stopping to write to her. She is learning to erase her from being a constant presence at the forefront of her mind and ease her into the background.

Anita would always be the splash of colors that had appeared on her canvas, its vividness capturing her, making her unable to tear her gaze away. Long after she had left- it would be a decade now, she had looked at the colors, not knowing what to do with it. She had been afraid that nothing would compare to it; the rest of her life would be spent chasing a palette of muted shades. And she had subconsciously surrounded herself with dull people with duller shades; perhaps afraid in her own way to allow somebody else to surpass Anita.