Chapter I: Her circumstances

It all went wrong. Even weeks before a cold winter’s day atomised Helen’s heart, nothing was right. 

The streets looked dreary. Empty, depressing and gray. Not even ants where squares used to be busy. Silence where laughter used to waft from open windows, and in the centers, every third door was sealed. 

All of a sudden, cities were ghost towns. It felt like  there was nothing and no one left in the world. Everywhere everyone was suddenly alone: lonely all the time, and it wasn't the kind of loneliness that you choose in order to find yourself. It was of the forced, commanded, unbearable sort, which you got lost in, as you couldn't leave it even when you desperately needed someone. 

Chosen solitude is a luxury. Very different from this one: a reclusion that held you captive in sarney days and endless emptiness. Something was missing. Something more than just the human touch. It was missing in the streets,  the flats, in people's faces. Most of the time, no one saw anyone, but when they did they saw it in each other's eyes. A lack of life, lack of freedom, lack of meaning. Lacking future, and - in the year of longing - some had even given up on longing, because it was too painful. 

Not Helen. She kept longing: for life, for love, for Tom. Above all, for him, as she had grown to love him. There are only little things which are as vulnerable as a loving heart. When it softens for something - a cause or another person - it is defenseless and deeply sensitive. In this state, it needs protection: craves a bit of safety. Except for dying, though, hardly anything in life is a safe bet. And then, suddenly, not even death was anymore. 

Unfortunately for the last year the world had been conspiring to deny the only certainty there would ever be. From one day to the next, everyone who died was unacceptable. No matter how old, no matter how sick: death was suddenly an imposition, and they convinced the living that they could have saved the dead - should have protected them better. 

The conditions for a loving heart were unthinkably bad, perhaps the worst From one day to the next, nothing was certain anymore. The clearest relations were being puzzled, laws of nature being questioned, and the foundations of reality shaken until it collapsed, leaving only ruins and decay. 

Once upon a time it had been  sure that there was no water on the moon, but the next second it started rusting. How could it possibly rust without? Quite similar to it, death used to just as clearly belong to life as water to the sea, when they suddenly refused to accept it. How could life possibly survive without? 

It was absurd. The year of longing negated itself until there was nothing left of it, but suffocating emptiness. The world is a cosmos. Its parts cannot stand isolated. They are interrelated. Only their oppositions give them meaning. If there were no darkness, there would be no light, and without death, no one could be alive. Which was why they weren’t much longer. 

They were trying to kill off dying itself. All of a sudden death was a dirty word, and who knew: it would maybe be taken out of the dictionary soon, now that no one was allowed to meet it any longer, no matter the cost. It cost a lot. First and foremost: the liveliness of the living, but in order to prevent the dying from dying it was just being accepted. Not by Helen, though.

She wanted to feel alive, and to her that meant more than a beating heart. It meant sailing the oceans, surrounded by the sea and at the helm of her destiny.  It meant a tingle in her senses at the surge of an elephant herd in the African veld.  It meant one more meal in Venice where - between the winding canals - she’d order another bottle of wine, and would, by the end of the night, meet an Italian guy whose warmth she’d feel on scented sheets.  It meant one more night of music in a crowded Irish small town pub, where she’d dance and sing along to her favorite songs, before she’d sit down at the bar next to a doter and listen to the same old story over and over.

It meant climbing the highest summits in the Andes with a bunch of strangers. Looking down from the Eiffel Tower, kissing someone she'd just met there. It meant walking the Pacific Crest and sleeping on squeaking bunk beds in cramped rec rooms every night. She wanted all of that. Just once. And what she wanted most was to mean something in someone else’s story.

She wanted to connect, but the year of longing left her disconnected. Not only from others, but from everything that used to be important to her. If she’d been given the choice between a well-seasoned bite of lifetime and a pot full of bland, she’d have taken the bite. Unfortunately, in the crisis no one was given choices any longer, and without them, life - as dark and empty as it was - stopped feeling like your own. In spite of it, the main thing was to hang on to it forever more. Woe betide anyone who didn't like it. 

Helen didn’t. Like expired milk, it made her gag. She was at a loss with it, and at some stage: simply lost in it. Any other year, being cast out wouldn’t have bothered her. That dress looks bad on you. Your lasagna tastes like shoes. When you touch me, it feels repulsing. She liked honesty. Almost more than other people. But in a world that is breathing lies hardly anyone can stand the truth anymore.

Hardly anyone could stand Helen anymore. She was used to offending, but the year of longing didn't even leave her that. In order to be offensive you need a dialogue, yet discourse was no longer the order of the day. Commands replaced suggestions, and orders - arguments. The exchange of opinions became undesirable. Making up your mind: suddenly, a crime. 

It felt like sitting in a vacuum. Although everyone moved their lips, no one could hear the other. Freedom: lost like a fleeting note. In the ruins of their dying lives, most couldn’t even be bothered to look for it. Except for Helen. She was still looking. All the time. 

‘Get a grip, it's only been a few weeks,’ her family tried to prevent it in spring. ‘If we can save someone else by a bit of abstinence that's not too much to ask, is it? The more we stick to it now, the sooner everything will get back to normal.’ 

As convinced as they were: they were wrong. The more they gave, the more was being taken. Those who couldn't sense it were long lost, but sensing wasn't for the people anymore. The last decades had vulgarized society. For years, there’d been too much of everything: too much data and  information which had caused a sensory overload, and once everything gets too much, people eventually tune out. They start closing themselves off, isolating or barricading themselves and get immersed in work, travel, sex, or drug excesses. In techno beats, extremes, or technical devices until the nonsense clouds their last sense. 

The last year had felt wrong all along: unnatural, cruel, out of line, and out of place. However, not to them. They didn’t feel it, and perhaps Helen couldn't even blame them. They were products of their time: no longer open to the sensory - unlike herself. It was as if another millennium had forgotten her here, and when the world went off the rails in the year of longing, it was perceptible to her in the first few weeks. 

She felt a windless calm. The kind that would only reign prior to disasters. Briefly before millennium storms, when all the birds would disappear from the sky. In the pastures, the cattle would start roaring, and on the body the air would feel heavier until it would nearly crush your bones. It holds its breath: the world on the brink of a disaster. Its heartbeat slows down. The rivers start to flow slower through its veins, and the next time you open your eyes, nothing is the same. 

‘The new normal,’ radio voices kept hailing down on her. ’We are at war with an invisible enemy. Only together will we defeat it.’ 

In wars no one decides for themselves. What's being done is up to the authorities. No one is really free in wars, and every life - at stake. No one is really safe, in wars, and by ignoring orders you kill your comrades. Lone fighters: undesirable. Demanded is obedience, and preferably of the kind that’s blind. All of a sudden, the individual was irrelevant, and noticed: only ever in an army. 

In the year of longing governments turned into  commanders and the people: into their soldiers. They are not entitled to question orders or have their own opinion. Without permission, they're not even entitled to speak. In spring - the moon had just begun to rust, and the first orders from above were distributed - Helen felt surrounded by soldiers who thought to be doing the right thing. That’s what soldiers always think: no matter how cruel the war, or how high the losses. Until they would be history, so a new present can disprove them. 

There was collateral damage. It is barely worth mentioning, they claimed, as there is always that in wars. Dead children, battered women, long famines, and sometimes they exceed the order. But the gently glowing inkling of victory on the far horizon is what makes it worth it. It gives you a reason to hang in there, no matter what. 

In the past year sick citizens had been denied treatments, allegedly out of solidarity. Depressed children hadn’t been allowed to get to know each other for much longer. Beaten women hadn’t been able to escape their tormentors, and the old had suddenly had to die alone - allegedly for their own protection. 

Everyone had clearly seen the collateral damage, but decided to ignore it. As early as April Helen realized the extent of everything gone wrong. Wishing she hadn’t ever seen it. 

∞∞∞

It was cold. Hoarfrost kissed the flower heads in the tired looking grass. The pale morning sun was trying hard, but couldn’t thaw it. Overnight, the frost had killed the shoots of the cherry trees in the nursing home park, which would usually blossom so beautifully at this time of year. In the early morning hours, Helen stood off the wide gravel path, pressing her cold hand against the steamed-up windows.

How much they must have experienced: the wrinkled hands that pressed against hers from inside. A story of its own to each notch in the discolored skin.

‘I've never seen anything as cruel as this,’ Helen heard her grandmother say. 

They were talking on the phone, although there was hardly any distance between them. To Helen's ear, the cell and every word from it felt freezing. Silky tears descended the furrows in the face behind the glass and dripped onto sterile floors.

‘I would have loved to go,’ the dry lips behind the windows whispered. ‘To his funeral, I mean. He used to live just a room away, but no one was allowed to come. Not even the family.’

Helen knew nothing to say. She knew nothing to do, and perhaps it would not even have been possible to give  comfort, as the words would merely have crashed against thick window panes, gone downlike injured birds, and died in agony.

‘You know what?’ her grandmother asked. ‘They said he died of this virus, but I saw him the day before. The man didn't have a virus, I'm telling you. The test may have been positive like that of everyone else around here, but most of them don't show symptoms, and neither did he.’ 

In wars, every dead body on one side is the other’s fault. Soldiers can die of thirst and strokes in battle, they can starve to death, take their lives, or get shot by their general: in the statistics, they will still only be casualties, murdered by the enemy.

‘Wasn't he waiting for a transplant and couldn't get it because of the crisis?’

Sometimes a nod can be as destructive as a blasting bomb - as demoralising as a doomsday vision.

‘A kidney transplant,’ her grandmother nodded. ‘They postponed it. For his own good, they said, and who knows: maybe it really was for his best that he died. At least he won't have to endure this terrible time anymore.’

Nobody asked those who were being protected whether or not they wanted protection, and who was actually in need of it was no longer clear. The old and the weak, they had been claiming at the start. Just like strong soldiers used to have to protect them back in the days. Women, children, the sick, and the elderly, who were unable to defend themselves.

‘No one wants to die, sure,’ Helen’s grandmother said, ‘but who wants to live like this? That’s no life!’

She was right. Every single death is tragic, the radio kept saying, and it was just as true now as it used to be prior to the year. The less the dying had gotten to live, the bigger of a tragedy. At least, back in the days, they could  themselves decide how dramatic it was going to get. They used to be  allowed to live enough so as to leave the world content. But since life was no longer allowed to kill anyone, both - the living and dying - had been frowned upon.

They were dying anyway. The old, and the weak, the sick, and unlike in the years before, now they didn’t get to make the best of their ever-fading days, before death  took them away. Normally, after a fatal diagnosis, patients have a choice. They can tie themselves to the hospital bed, hoping that, like this, they will last a bit longer. Or they get out of bed as long as they still can, so as to feel alive for the ever-dwindling rest of their time. In the year of longing the latter wasn’t an option. 

They were condemned to vegetate until even the core-healthy would wish for the end, as their life would feel deader than death could ever. All the time they kept invoking the high value of life, but ignored what living really meant. The laughter of a grandchild, gentle hugs among a group of friends, songs sung with strangers in a late night bar, or high emotions shared with others. Those were the things which gave a value to life, not the beating of a heart. It isn’t worth a dime without something that makes you want to keep breathing. Because a heart that beats, but no longer feels, might survive, yet won’t ever come alive.

In quiet moments when the fog lifts, it becomes perceptible. The sun breaks through the clouds, and suddenly you would recognise yourself. Walking down the street, you’d notice what it is that makes you want to live. For everyone it is something different. It can be an activity, another person, or a feeling. The things that make you want to keep opening your eyes morning after morning. You need them like oxygen. Without them, you can just as well leave the world, because people aren’t bacteria. They don't want to live if it is merely for the sake of avoiding extinction.

That was, at least, what Helen used to think prior to the year. Now she wasn’t sure about it anymore, since she wearily observed a society that kept on disappointing her day after day. 

‘I have to go now,’ she said to her grandmother like every other Wednesday morning, her hand still pressed against the windows. 

She didn't really have to leave. If there was suddenly an excess of anything, it was time. All at once, there was way too much of it: a whole heap of frozen minutes in which nothing ever happened. With which no one really knew what to do. They simply didn't move, and the warmth to thaw them out was nowhere to be found. They detached from life to reduce what was left of it, and the more of them detached, the twitchier the legs became. 

Helen took one last look at the wrinkled face behind the windows. Maybe she didn't have to, but wanted to leave. Not so much to get away from here, but to keep on moving while nothing else was. The flight instinct is unbearable in times like these when the hands  freeze to the windows and lose their last ability to act. She took her fingers off the glass, afraid of the silky tears that would soon flood the sunken cheeks behind it. What remained was a handprint on thick panes, and in the eyes behind: the desire for a death that no one was allowed to die, however much they might have wanted to.

∞∞∞

On her way back from her visit to the nursing home, Helen met a neighbor who hadn’t saluted in weeks. As far as she knew people were still allowed to say hello, were they not? Barely anyone ever would. Since they were soldiers, braving death by barely ever living, they hardly said a word. 

Sitting at home like they had been ordered to do, they were finally given a chance. In front of their televisions, they got to become heroes. Well, at least they were allowed to feel like heroism was only an hour of doing nothing away.

Back in the days, undaunted and courageous, heroes would face difficult tasks, and achieve the extraordinary which they would be admired for. They would actively do something for their world: liberate people, confront dangerous dragons, or overthrow an unjust king. Unlike in the year of longing.

It was no longer deeds, but numb obedience which qualified a hero. Tempting, because suddenly it was so easy to become heroic, and secretly everyone wanted to feel like they were: even Helen. Nevertheless, she knew that it couldn't be this easy. 

Heroes have to dare something. They never follow others blindly. In a flock of sheep there is no room for heroism. It isn’t the masses, but individuals who become heroes, and along their way, the entire world would stand against them. They would move against resistance: a bit like runners in a rushing storm.

Helen liked running. Every evening she’d go, and she knew what headwinds felt like. You are running and running. Your heart starts pounding faster until each breath catches in your throat. Every of your muscles cramps up, and what’s driving you on is the bend on the far horizon where the wind might finally be at your back. But when you reach it and turn, the storm changes direction. Even so, you don't want to give up, because further back, you see another bend, and as long as there is any left, so is hope for tailwind.

Just like this, in life you would sometimes run and run, but hardly move forward. You’d feel like fainting, exerting yourself, but no matter how many turns you’d take: the wind would keep hitting your face. To keep on running in spite of it, you’d have to be a fighter. Helen was, but the year of longing was a strong opponent. It kept giving her headwinds to slow her down. Within months, it was as if the days were iron shackles, joined together around her wrists, and shackled fighters are doing hard to find a purpose.

‘You see where things are going, don’t you?’ she would keep asking everyone she knew. ‘We're permanently quarantined and nothing suits the government like isolated citizens who, out of fear, simply bow to everything they're asked to do.’

All of a sudden, they didn’t only behave like soldiers: just as well they spoke like them. Even in Helen's circle. 

‘The government has a duty to protect its people,’ they’d answer. ‘We are in a global disaster situation. Where is your solidarity? If we abide by the rules now, it’ll be over quicker.’ 

They weren’t making sense to Helen. Bit by bit, she struggled to believe that they really couldn’t see it. Even after rogue government employees and criticism  from international institutions. The government had become the disaster it had declared. Instead of looking for solutions, they kept on promoting the problem, spread fear, and perpetuated it.

‘You know what's going to be over real quick, if you keep on doing nothing? Freedom and democracy. Don't you have an awareness of history at all?’

They did. Of course they remembered the enabling act and all the other authorisations that had led Germany into its darkest hour less than a century ago. But their memory got twisted like a dislocated joint, and the media conjured up the ghost of an old enemy: Hitler. In their insecurity, people welcomed it with open arms.

’Have you gone over to the Nazis now?’ They kept on asking Helen whenever she criticized absurde regulations. ’You almost sound like a conspiracy theorist. That's exactly the way right-wingers would talk in order to destabilize democracy and get into power.’

What’s not in focus of a camera blurs beyond recognition. It was a diversionary tactic that they suddenly claimed critics of the system could only be Nazis. Recognised scientists, human rights activists, lawyers, and constitutional judges: everyone who kept insisting on the value of freedom just automatically had to be on the far right, or at the very least naive, and therefore: a perfect  victim for extremists.

The world was losing color. It faded until it was a still image in black and white. Focused on the danger from the right, they were missing what was happening at the blurring sides: the diminishment of constitutional rights.

‘Not a single governmental decision in recent times has been based on facts,’ Helen would moan. ‘Not once has your government proven that lockdowns really save lives. If anything, studies indicate the opposite.’

‘Huh? This virus is a novelty. That’s why they don’t have evidence yet.’

They kept on defending their side: were unteachable believers in health policies, as if it were a cult. 

‘What would you do differently? Let the old and weak die, would you? Don't you have any morals at all?’

They made it sound like morality was a commodity, bought by blind obedience. Nevermind that the solidarity they were loudly calling for was discriminatory. It was limited to a predetermined framework. In their eyes, only a fraction of society was still worthy of protection: the ones that they were told to look after. Where was their empathy for everyone else? Their solidarity with everyone who died because of the taken measures?

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ they would dismiss objections like this, as if you were telling them about an alien invasion. ‘Where did you get evidence for this? Maybe from F******k? Or did the right wing party supply you with it?’

Funny enough that this was what they questioned: them out of all people, even though they were themselves the ones who didn’t prove a thing. They felt like confirmation from above was evidence enough and did not even bother with facts any longer. Without the measures, millions of people would have died, they kept on arguing, and referred to epidemiological models, none of which were an actual proof, since  no model in the world is meant to tell the truth. That’s what makes them models. 

They aren’t reality, but based on figures of the present, turned into forecasts for the future by an algorithm. What they conclude has to come true just as little as the prophecies of Nostradamus. Especially as for a virus. It's alive and, therefore, changing. What it will do next stays unpredictable, and unreliable is every calculation. It was an assumption on the basis of which the government curtailed constitutional rights: just as unprovable as the beliefs of the conspiracy theorists they cursed so much. In the year of longing they passed off probabilities as an absolute truth. Suddenly the world became obsessed with incoherent numbers, like a clinically paranoid: with his crude views.

‘Considering you long for proof so much, where is yours?’ Helen was constantly interrogated. As if they were lawyers, immoral and cold, who never actually gave an answer, and covered it up with a load of counter-questions. Not with Helen, though. Noticing what they were trying to do, she just wouldn’t let it go.

‘Look at the terminally ill who are no longer being treated, so they’ll have enough empty beds for potential viral patients who, by the way, may never come. Or what about the emotionally impoverished who are in isolation now? Loneliness is the biggest suicide driver, hundreds of studies have proven.’

If the government really wanted to save lives, why did it not care about those? Perhaps because suicides didn’t count any longer in the year of longing. In Germany they were an expendable marginal, not even worth a mention. Scum who would now finally stop taking air away from those who really wanted to breathe.

‘It's their own fault. Everyone needs a bit of resilience in life. Who lets their grandparents die for unstable people like this who don't even want to live?’

Faced with questions like those, Helen wanted to grab her head. She wanted to gasp for air, and developed suicidal thoughts herself when she heard them say it. She wanted to scream, and rage, howl and bark at them, because they had no arguments, except for what they had been told could happen, if the government didn't put life to death. Instead of a medicine against the pandemic, they were being fed poison, the dose of which only ever kept increasing, and so did the prescribed duration. Until it fully scotched what life was meant to be.

Their arguments for their actions consisted only of predictions, thin assumptions, and unlikely probabilities: not facts. Factual matters are definite. They are certain, indisputable, and incontestable. As watertight they are supposed to be as the arguments, with which organizations and initiatives started criticizing the taken measures during summer.

‘In the Third World our lockdowns cost millions of lives, because poverty is rising, and vaccinations are being suspended. And even in Western countries mortality behaves proportional to economic strength. Shutting down the economy without an end date, raises unemployment. The rich-poor divide increases and crime arises.’

‘It's all about right now,’ they would reply when they were being asked about their solidarity with everyone who was affected by this. ‘Can you not see that we have a pandemic right now and need to stand with those who could die from it as early as tomorrow?’

Not will, but could. Because of a ‘could’ they signed a certain death sentence for thousands. They approved insolvencies and lost livelihoods, just because of a ‘could’. And if anyone said anything against it, they called them egoists, narcissists, sometimes even murderers, just like they’d been told to do. 

As transparent as it was, it was working out. Those who didn’t seek the truth in a media full of propaganda wouldn’t find it any longer. What the measures were causing was consistently concealed, and ignored was every voice that no longer wanted to keep silent. To seal the deal, the government had been warning against misinformation early on, and now they were calling on the masses to trust only reputable sources: governmental information.

Manipulation comes in many guises. It can be obvious: an artificial dam that is changing the water flow. Other times, it remains invisible, and like a chemical, it cools down a river until it eventually freezes. Helen came close to slipping on the icy surface of the year. 

Whenever she spoke to others, she realized how much they had been manipulated. Instead of information, she got only quotes from them. They didn't even notice that they, like soulless machines, only kept repeating what had been whispered to them through newspapers, television, radios: that too many people were dying and that everyone who asked questions was to blame. 

‘Like a plane crash every day,’ the top ranks in politics kept referring to the daily deaths, and their entourage was looking for the culprits.

‘Because of deniers like you,’ they would accuse people like Helen, ‘1.082 people died today.’

Everyone who refused to go with the mass was being ostracized, and they would have loved to give them the death penalty for a seeming lack of solidarity.

‘Don't you know that not even your death toll is causally linked to the virus for sure?’ 

Questions like these were being ignored: they simply blanked them out. Even the Federal Statistical Office admitted to it, though. Of course we include suicides in the statistics, if they are testing positive! So they had proudly proclaimed. Because it’s better to over- than underestimate the lethality of a disease, they'd explained. 

‘And with trustworthy figures like those you want to justify what’s happening?’ 

When Helen asked questions like this, they simply nodded, as if they couldn’t see anything wrong with it, and maybe they had really persuaded themselves that there was nothing wrong, so they could sleep better at night. No one wants to be blamed for the death of other people. Afraid they would be blamed for it if they showed resistance, they  just kept silent. 

They were silent about all the discrepancies. Silent about contradictions and silent about injustice. They buried every objection, even  those they could see. Not everyone did, though. As early as April Helen felt hopeful that the wind would be at her back after the next bend. But hope, they say, is for the desperate. 

∞∞∞

Walks. Every day. That was what kept Helen sane. Somewhere she just had to go to make it through her days. 

The sky shot with raindrops, thick and heavy. They caught in her hair, as if they were beads, woven into it. Reaching the old birch tree at the end of her street, she’d sometimes stand beneath it, and imagine hanging her longing on its branches, so the next breeze would take it away. 

It was an April day when the old birch was shining blue. This time Helen couldn't stop beneath it. For the first time in weeks, it was loud in her street: dozens of voices, as if it were last year. Police officers were standing in front of her house. They'd left their car on the curb, the headlights on, and the door open, as if something terrible had happened. Something terrible had, indeed, been happening for more months. But that wasn’t why they were there.

‘What's going on?’ she asked the onlooking neighbors beside the staircase, once she had reached them. 

Apparently it was about Benji, the neighbor's boy from two doors down. A bright, little child active, and as hungry for life as you would only see it in children’s eyes. Prior to the year of longing, every Friday Helen had brought him a surprise, and whenever she would meet him in the street, she would salute him with philosophical questions. He usually knew how to answer them better than she did.

‘No one has seen him for 24 hours,’ a neighbor whispered. ‘They assume he ran away.’

‘Ran away? Isn't he only nine?’

‘Eleven, but actually older since his father left. Yesterday afternoon he snuck out and just disappeared.’

Children don't just disappear. They wouldn't if they feel safe. They wouldn’t if they are well looked after, challenged, and loved. Benji's mother loved him. Undeniably so, but love  isn’t always enough. As a child, you love the whole world. You’re looking for its love, and in the decay out there it was increasingly difficult to find it.

‘I hope nothing happened to him in this horrible world.’

Helen returned the looks of the neighbor who had said it. The world wasn’t horrible in her eyes, and neither were its people. Although, lately, almost everything tried to prove her wrong. One of the officers approached. He looked tall and strong, but Helen wasn’t easily intimidated by authority. 

‘You aren’t wearing a face mask,’ he muttered, facing her. ‘People are crowding here, you’d actually be supposed to.’

’Then where's yours?’

She eyeballed him. But instead of resentment or severity, a sea of despair was washing over her.

‘Let me finish. The regulations are a joke, I was just about to say. A child is missing, for God’s sake! Strangers should be in each other's arms, and what we should want to see on people's faces is empathy instead of masks.’

On his it was plain to see: purest empathy. Unfiltered,   emotion, and everything else that was painfully missing in the year of longing. Above all, perhaps, the courage to keep on feeling at all, in a world as hostile to life as theirs had become. Looking at him, Helen showered him with respect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the crowd, admonishing looks spilled from the anxious eyes of the other officers, as if they tried to wash away his statement like a bloody stain from a coat.

All of a sudden Helen had to leave. She was still feeling restless, and the longer a sea of admonishing stares washed over her, the less she could still bear it. She disappeared without a word: a bit like Benji had done. A crack of her key in the lock, a rattle of the washing machine in her kitchen, and she was inside, closed the door, and shut the world out.  In her living room the blue light that was squeezing inside from beneath her window cast sharp shadows. For a while she watched them dancing up and down the walls.

When she switched on the lamp on the living room table - a vintage one from times of freedom - the shadows on the walls started to multiply. Lost in thought, she kept staring at their dance, and sat in silence for some time. She didn’t even hear herself breathe. Someone, though, was breathing. The shadows spilled sounds that weren’t her own. And eventually: a voice.

‘How could they see anything but shadows, if they were never even allowed to move their heads?’

Startled, Helen jumped up. She nearly knocked the armchair. At first, she thought she had imagined the words. Until she spotted him: right next to the tall cactus in the far corner, he was standing.

‘Benji?’ A sound of surprise. ‘For God’s sake, downstairs everyone is looking for you!’

Like a silk scarf, the shadows slipped off him as he took a hesitant step closer.

‘I know.’

Fatigue ate away the hunger for life in his eyes, and rigidity froze the energy he used to carry upon his features.

‘Please don't tell them I'm here.’ 

His voice broke a splinter from Helen's heart. He sounded haggard. Like a homeless person, asking for donations to survive the winter.

‘No, we cannot do that, Benji, your mother is worried, mad! Where were you?’

Guilty glances. He slumped onto the couch, and collapsed like a deflated balloon.

‘Here,’ he whispered, ‘I used the spare key under your doormat.’

Helen snapped out of her shock

‘Okey, we really have to tell your mother! You cannot just disappear and tell no one where you’re going.’

It sounded arguable, coming from her who herself kept on disappearing for no reason.

‘I can't stand it at home,’ he muttered. ‘Can I not stay here? Please! Only for a few days!’

Helen thought about it.

She would have loved to let him stay. At least, until life would return into his eyes.

In the year of longing, her flat felt lonely whenever dusk crept across the sky, and darkness hugged the streets outside.

‘Put on your shoes,’ she rebuked him even though, ‘we're going downstairs, your mum will be relieved to see you.’

A disappointed shrug.

‘She doesn’t see anything, anyway. Just like in Plato’s story, remember? The one you gave me.’

People in a dark cave. In front of their fire, they see merely shadows of the actual world: the only reality they’ve ever known. Until one of them is forced to lift his head. Attracted by the light outside, he leaves the cave, and sees reality. He wants to tell the others and returns inside. Would they believe or doubt him? Thank or condemn him for it?

‘They'd beat him up,’ Benji muttered. ‘Remember last year when I had a black eye, because I told Michael Santa isn’t real?’

Helen gave him a weak smile, started nodding gently, and sank down beside him.

‘You know, usually, when the truth doesn't suit someone, they either get depressed or offensive. If they have strong enough instincts, probably the latter.’

She moved a little closer, and for a moment regretted not having children of her own. If she were to have any, they would hopefully be bright like him who could still turn the astray gone world around.

‘Helen?’

He rested his head on her shoulder. A deep sigh climbed up his throat, slipped over his tongue, and gently slid into the room.

‘Will we ever be happy again?’

Sometimes hesitation sounds just as final as death, and silence: like the most painful of answers.

‘I hope so,’ she whispered, striking his hair. ‘We just have to keep hoping, kid.’

Ten minutes later, she brought him downstairs. His mother was crying. Hard to say whether hers were tears of relief or anger. Just as she was about to scold him, the policeman with the empathic eyes held her back. He slid into a crouch, and put his hand on Benji's shoulder.

‘This time sucks with all its bans, huh? But you know what? When everything bugs you next time, don't just run away. Call me, and I'll pick you up, so we can do something exciting! And about the bans: I promise I'll work on it, alright?’

Helen smiled. All of them were promising, sure: from politicians to pharmaceutical companies, but when the officer with the empathetic eyes said it, it sounded different: maybe simply genuine. In thoughts, she stepped out of the crowd and lit a cigarette. She had given up smoking, and taken it up again this year.

Everyone needs a few risks in life, do they not?

Staring at the stars, she sent her mind to Tom. To his kisses that kept on burning on her thighs like wildfire, to his warmth when she would feel him beside her on a dampish set of sheets, and to his eyes: the purest she had ever known.

What she would have given to fall asleep with her head on his chest tonight and only his heartbeat in her ears!

Like an airtight pane, the lockdown had slid between them. It wasn’t distance that separated them, but a border that had closed in their faces. Barricades which were insurmountable. Not only the border fence: himself he would draw up walls whenever they wouldn’t see each other. Prior to the year, he used to consistently hide behind them. Helen had just made it to climb over and torn herself open on his barbed wire.

He was worth it, though: a single second beside him was worth every injury in the world. Now she didn’t know when she would get to see him again. But she knew all too well that he would use the time of her absence to build new walls, and stretch new wire.

They had been close, briefly before any of this had happened. Maybe only for a heartbeat, but for the first time: heart to heart. But like glass from plastic, they had gotten separated from one another, and now they were each on their own sitting in a closed container, as if waiting for disposal. Helen had to accept that he mightn’t ever let her climb his walls again. She mightn’t ever get back to where she had just been with him: might have to let it go. 

The more time went by, the higher the probability for it. She simply had no more: no more strength to keep on hanging on and no more time, because beginning love is as fragile as thin blown glass.

‘Got a lighter?’

A calm voice right next to her ear. It belonged to the empathic policeman, and brought her mind back from the clouds in the sky, back from Tom, back from her longing. Her vivid eyes touched down like landing crows: shy, but just as well intrigued. He deserved a lighter, the officer with the gentle eyes, which was why she started rummaging for it in her woolen coat. There it was! Smiling, she handed it over.

‘You can keep it. For what you said to Benji.’

For a while, they were standing next to each other in silence: cuddled by smoke, and gently enwrapped in starlight, as if it were a second skin. Then, all of a sudden, Helen turned towards him.

‘Can I ask you something?’

A look, a nod, a smile, and she asked.

‘Does this kind of thing happen a lot since lockdown? Runaways, I mean.’

A cloud of anger was passing over the empathy in his face: no anger at Helen, but at the world.

‘If it were only runaways,’ he replied and blew thick clouds of smoke into the night, so he wouldn’t have to see the world behind it any longer. ‘Beaten up children. Emotionally impoverished and traumatized kids. All of that, and more of them each week.’

’Must be hard. Just wondering how anyone can see this kind of stuff every day, knowing that they have to intervene even though, when someone doesn’t stick to regulations.’

He was looking at her for a long time. His eyes penetrated so far that she could feel them in her soul. Whatever they found in her: suddenly he rummaged in his pockets and pulled a flier out. Under the cover of smoke, he stretched it in Helen's direction until she hesitantly reached for it.

‘What’s that?’

It wasn’t only a flier with an address but a page of hope.

‘We're going to take to the streets on Friday, while we still have the right to protest. Someone has to do something about all of it, before they suspend what’s left of democracy.”

He paused, as if he weren’t sure whether he could trust her. Eventually, though, he just did.

“Come on over. I will be speaking.’

Helen twitched at her washed out jeans.

He had a point. They had switched off democracy like a suddenly useless machine and someone had to do something about it. Sooner rather than later, because the longer machines stand in a garage unused, the harder they are to restart.

‘I'll be there,’ she whispered, slipping the flier into the pocket above her heart.

That night, she slept better than the nights before, and the next few days she spent with an excited flutter in her heart. But then Friday came along, and put the page of hope she had been given through the shredder.

∞∞∞

It was a sunny day. Pleasant, despite the cold. For the first time in weeks the air didn't taste like second hand. Instead, it tasted fresh: a bit bit like freedom would.

Thousands of people - every age, every culture - and from their middle, colorful banners rose towards the sky. They were demanding it back: the life that had been taken from them by a year of longing, like a well deserved mouse from a hungry cat. Those who give up freedom for security will lose both. Slogans like this surrounded the lectern in the middle of the marketplace.

Someone was playing the guitar and people softly sang along, sounding what solidarity was meant to sound like: like hundreds of voices singing songs of freedom. What it is meant to look like is dozens of individuals who merge into a collective, and it is meant to scent like the sweat on the temples of densely packed people in the midday sun.

It was real solidarity that was wafting through the streets that Friday: not exploiting, discriminatory, or forced. It wasn’t frozen, but breathing and living. Clearly it was of the sort that was concerning everyone, and trying to not turn a blind eye to anyone. What it left behind was hope that something could, at some stage, change.

Helen got carried away by it as if by a river. Amidst the crowd, she felt her heart crack open, so it could beat unrestrained. Being in this place, at this time, just felt right: more than any other thing in the absurdity of her dying reality. At least for a short time. In just a moment, her freshly hatched hope was to be snatched from her cramping hands like a brand new handbag in a robbery, so she’d be left on the street without anything of value.

It was policemen with water cannons and tear gas who stole it. They appeared out of nowhere. Screams suddenly drowned out the songs of freedom. Where people had just been standing up for their rights, masses of water swept them to the ground and the weak who were allegedly being to be protected were the first who got hit.

Helen made it out of there in time. Her heart was racing and her body stiffening as she stood in the shadows of the lectern, dragging her eyes across the battlefield. Bewilderment occupied her gaze, faintness settled over her mind and, in a single beat, her heart felt heavier. Not even the soft voice next to her could change it.

‘Come on, we need to go!’

Helen looked at the officer with the empathic eyes, but hardly reacted to his words. Shock had crept into her bones, like the cold in winter. It prevented her from hearing, seeing, feeling anything. The officer with the empathy took her by the hand, and dragged her along until the screams in their backs were fading. He hadn’t even been given a chance to speak. Instead, men in uniforms had started pouncing on the crowds, like incited dogs.

‘Are you alright?’ He kept on asking, but she kept silent.

Perhaps nothing would ever be alright again.

Like a too tight dress, shock was enwrapping her body, and impairing her breathing. Only three streets further, she tried to slip it off.

‘Do you... know the officers out there?’

The shaky words from her lips didn’t instantly get a reply, and perhaps his embarrassed expression would have been enough of an answer. Nodding, he pressed on his smartphone screen, so he would not have to return her looks. His phone distracted him from everything out there: first and foremost, from the grueling feeling of being powerless.

‘I'm going to lose my job, you know,’ he murmured. ‘Someone in my position who speaks at Nazi meets like this is no longer acceptable, they said.’

‘Nazi meets?’

She contorted her face when, all of a sudden, he held the smartphone under her nose.

‘Just look at what the media are writing.’

From the article on the glowing screen words like extremists leapt to her throat.

‘I don't know about you,’ the officer muttered, ‘but I haven't seen anything like that up there. Sure, some extremists are always in a crowd, but that is wherever you go.’

He slid the smartphone back into his pocket, and Helen's eyes reached into the void. Only that day she really realized that they were living in different worlds: the two parts which society had divided into. Each of them with their own perception of reality.

Ostracized, defamed, and declared insane. She started feeling like a crazy person. Perhaps not only lunatics would feel what she was feeling, though: visionaries, might just as well. Hadn’t they been victims of denigration during the Middle Ages?

∞∞∞

The officer with the gentle eyes was right about his job. They initiated disciplinary proceedings against him. Freedom of expression no longer applied to everyone. At least he was in good company.

In the following months judges were removed from their positions on flimsy grounds. Employees of the health department, doctors, even people of the interior. Lawyers were taken to psychiatric hospitals, and chief criminal commissioners removed from their office as soon as they stood up and in for their freedom. The right of assembly was, just as every other constitutional right, being restricted by an unauthorized institution that was passing laws offside the parliament to suit itself.

‘So what? As long as it helps,’ was what people on the other side were saying and on Helen’s: ‘In less than half a year, they’ve laid the tracks for absolute social control and autocracy.’

The government had built a new reality, oppressive and dark, and the people sat in front of the fire they had stoked to make them believe they were being looked after, so they wouldn’t care that they would only ever recognise a shadow of the world. What was real and what was not didn’t matter anymore, now that those inside and outside were sure to see the only truth that existed.

Once they live in different worlds, people are losing their common framework of reference, and their basis for communication plunges into the abyss as the ground is crumbling underneath their feet.

Separated and divided. This was what society looked like after half a year of longing. Standing in the light outside, Helen watched it, filled with desperation. Everything went downhill. Step by step, faster and faster. With all her heart, she wanted to convince the others to raise their heads, and from time to time she even tried to make them. Those were the days she would despair the most.

They didn't want to move their heads, didn't want to see the truth, but preferred to sit in front of their fire, seemingly safe, instead of leaving the cave to return outside where - alongside frightening freedom - a huge pile of life with all its risks and possibilities was waiting. Although it felt like it, developments like this don't happen overnight. They don't just fall from the sky like a burning airplane, but take some time to prepare, and perhaps they could have been foreseen if anyone had bothered.

Life hadn’t always been depressing, it hadn’t always been repressing. What it used to be prior to the year of longing was pressing, and the pressure it used to cause with its unlimited possibilities had simply become too much. Until a year ago, in order to be accepted you had been expected to make each second count. 

You had been asked to take advantage of as many possibilities as you possibly could. For years everyone had to be more than anyone could have possibly become, and in the lonesome twilight, you would secretly feel like you would never be enough. As if you had no chance at all to cram enough into your days, so as to justify your beating heart. Anyone who would refuse to constantly strive for fulfillment used to be cast out, and declared a failure.

Now, though, everything was different. In front of a fire, in a warm cave, you weren’t forced into living anymore: of the oh so pressing opportunities none remained. You weren’t considered a failure for doing nothing with your days, and finally every breath taken was enough to justify a life. Incapacitation was the wellness holiday everyone had been longing for. There was finally no longer any need to rush after life or its opportunities. Suddenly it was respected to simply sit back and watch the minutes pass.

Perhaps developments like this are pre-programmed. Throughout history, eras of opposed orientation used to always follow one another. Realism after Romanticism. New Objectivity after Surrealism. After Mannerism, Baroque, and perhaps it was now time for an age of dead life and pre-set trajectories to replace the pressure of freedom. 

Normally, however, new ages dawn naturally. They would arise from the midst of society, but it was different this time. Society was forced into an artificially created upheaval. Can it ever work this way?

It didn’t, for people like Helen. Everyone in the cave tried to force her back inside, but she kept resisting, and wouldn't stop to fight.

‘Is this how you imagine your future?’ she kept on asking. ‘Patronizing, full of lies, and without personal responsibility? Without life? Do you really want to destroy millions of existences for a future of this kind? Let thousands of people die? You can't be serious!’

They were serious, though. They kept on talking it up, and rejected each and every objection, like water-repellent fabric rejects heavy rain.

‘None of this really bothers me personally. I don't have to abide by all of it.’

Replies like those broke Helen's heart most. Me personally, I don’t.

Could they have been any more selfish?

The same people who would constantly invoke solidarity saw only themselves. It was as if the rest of the world were no longer there at all, and maybe that was how it really was. In enforced isolation, everyone was thrown back on themselves. Those who hardly lost, and barely had to give up anything suddenly demanded sacrifices from others: the privileged from those who had nothing at all. And the ones who called them out on it became unacceptable.

Like Helen.

∞∞∞

By summer, Helen had become an interference to society, and by autumn, it stopped bothering her. That was because of Tom.

For months, she hadn’t seen him, had hardly even talked to him. At first: from time to time, but eventually: not at all. Until the bans had been lifted for a while in order to keep the crowds in line. They had lifted them just enough, so the wind of change would touch you, but since your face was still covered with a mask, you would barely feel it blow.

The borders reopened, and shortly after those between Germany and Austria, Tom opened his. When they touched for the first time in months, it felt as if no time had passed: like a comet shower, a volcanic eruption, perhaps the Big Bang itself.

While the summer days were passing, he was there beside her: next to her, with his pure eyes and his burning kisses. There he was still, when it came like it had to come: step by step, they reintroduced restrictions, and they got separated once more.

Love and trust don’t grow in installments. You cannot keep disturbing them if you want to see them bloom. How Helen would have wished for him to be her place to land, in a time this volatile! But he was a sailboat in the wind, the course of which was influenced by the smallest breeze. He was too unsteady to give her security and, while he kept sweeping her away, she couldn't give him any either.

There was only one thing Helen used to always be sure of: her feelings for him. They could have been everything to each other: perhaps were it for a while. Sometimes, though, no matter how strong a feeling, as long as it is scared of itself it won't ever reach out far enough to conquer an ocean.

In late autumn Helen felt it, and when winter arrived, her circumstances couldn’t have been worse. Shortly after the turn of the year she suddenly felt a crushing weight on her shoulders. She used to know how to balance the ballast of her life. But the circumstances of the time started shifting the burdens she had just been carrying, without even noticing.

If it had been in a different time, her back mightn’t have broken, and her heart mightn’t have atomised on a cold February night. It is what it is, though, and she is now falling. The realization comes too late: just like everything else that really counts in life.