Chapter II: Her burdens

Two days after Helen’s heart atomised in a cold February night, its splinters felt ever heavier in her chest. She hadn’t really gotten sleep. At dawn, she had trudged past muddy hoofprints in empty donkey pastures.

For the second day in a row, she was in front of the Brandtner house now, where the children were still playing in the garden. Where the blond widow was still empty-eyed: unlike yesterday, not on the patio, but in the spacious kitchen, next to water that kept boiling on the cooker and fogged up the window panes.

It was cold. The firm grip of dawn kept shaking Helen’s limbs. Shivering, she'd been standing there for an hour, and was almost frozen to the spot. Not even her breath was warm any longer. Maybe she was no longer breathing at all, but only waiting to collapse beneath the first rays of the sun like a thawing snowman.

She imagined walking through the squeaky gate with the white squiggles, entering the colorful doormat, ringing the bright blue doorbell, and getting rid of what she wanted to say. But what do you tell a woman who lets the water simmer until it evaporates? Sorry for your loss, perhaps, but it wouldn't help her, and neither would it return the evaporated water. ‘Sorry for your loss’ doesn't help anyone whom something terrible has happened to. People only say it so they can sleep again at night, and forget the terrible thing that’s happened to someone else, which might pass them just as well sometime.

Helen had expressed her condolences many times before: more often than she would have liked to do it, and today she was determined to do it once more. Because she finally wanted to sleep peacefully again, and someday maybe even dream.

It was shortly before seven when the blue front door opened. The children were setting off into the crumbling ruins of a life that no longer existed. They didn’t see Helen, who had snuggled into the darkness, as if it were a blanket. Only when they reached the bus stop a few feet away, she shook off the shadows, and started moving.

She followed them. Her atomised heart drifted after them, as if it were a sledge that they pulled behind them through the icy streets. Helen approached them as they stood there, waiting. She was just about to reach them, if it hadn't been for a voice in her back.

‘Helen? What are you doing here? I haven't seen you in ages, are you alright?’

Dr Scherer? Perhaps the doing of a cruel fate!

Although Helen still felt drawn to the children, she stopped and turned towards the voice, hoping that the atoms of her heart wouldn’t be visible in her eyes.

‘The world’s changed quite a bit since we last saw each other, hasn't it? With the virus and the bans… My practice had to stay closed for months, and now almost everything is done through video chat.’ An intense look. ‘How are you doing with everything?’ She sighed. ‘Hopefully ok to some extent?’

Helen was hesitating. She didn’t really want a conversation about the year of longing: a call for resilience, renunciation, and solidarity from people who wouldn't even make room on the pavement when somebody else came towards them.

‘Well, life has its risks,’ she muttered. ‘Shutting down entire countries because of a virus makes no sense to me.’

The school bus pulled in. Its squeaking doors swallowed up the children. From one second to the next, they were gone, and on the street they left the same emptiness that people had in their eyes: a cold, depressing void that was missing life. Helen could no longer hide her disappointment.

’If you’d like to talk to someone,’ Dr Scherer reacted to the look upon her face, as if she knew what her glances were about. ‘You still have my number, don’t you?’

A grudging nod. Once a week Helen used to sit in her practice, all those years ago. Behind closed blinds, in the attic of a blue apartment building, where the light at the other side of the heavy door would find even the smallest gap in the leaf so as to squeeze in. Back then her visits hadn’t helped and what didn’t help a broken heart certainly wouldn’t heal an atomised one.

‘You know, Helen, it wouldn’t be unusual if the crisis triggered you. It would be natural if you felt reminded of those you lost tragically, all those years ago.’

Helen’s eyes emptied, like a water bucket with a hole. Nobody called it by its name. It was as if it didn’t have one. Even years later, they still tried to keep it hidden, like children would do with a broken vase, afraid of angering their parents.

Helen hadn’t lost anyone tragically. Tragic is an accident, a disease, an act of blood. Those who leave, because they don't know what to do with a huge pile of future don’t leave tragically, but on their own free will. People who want to be polite don’t talk about suicide. They talk around it, yet in reality their obscuration isn’t polite at all: only weak.

‘I think about them all the time,’ she replied to Dr Scherer, ’not just now that half the world is thinking about suicide, as nobody sees a future any loger.’

Sometimes, the social distancing rules weren’t bad at all. If Dr Scherer hadn't had to keep her distance, she would probably have jumped to Helen's side, and put a hand on her shoulder to express her sympathy now. Who longs for lax hands upon them that felt like nothing at all: unpleasant, at best?

Helen was relieved that she got to avoid it.

Whichever things she would have wanted to accuse Dr Scherer of: incompetence wasn’t one of them. The woman was good at her job: the soul life of other people. Immediately she recognised the distance of entire oceans that Helen kept to her, yet knew it would be conquerable.

∞∞∞

‘I’ve considered your offer and would like to talk.’ It was with these words Helen's voice piped up at Dr Scherer’s practice phone, a few hours after their accidental encounter. Dr Scherer had been waiting for her call. On the table in front of her was the proof: Helen’s folder.A thick map for a person who was supposed to have a strong heart. Or maybe they always have thick folders, the people with the strong hearts, because they have to experience a lot for their hearts to find any strength.

‘I was just wondering what you would suggest I should do if I feel like suddenly everything is just... too much?’

Helen was ashamed of the question, because it had always been herself who had been too much, and all of a sudden she was the one who felt like things were overwhelming. Dr Scherer wasn’t surprised by it, though. Of course she wouldn’t have been, because she was good at her job, or maybe she was only biased, given what she knew about Helen.

‘As I said, overburdening isn’t unusual in a crisis.’

A huge pile of future that you don't know what to do with: that was what overburdening felt like. Helen meant something else and it had little to do with the crisis.

‘It feels more like a bomb explosion. I open my eyes and feel that a spark touches the fuse, and I cannot do anything about it: only wait for it to burn down and blow everything up.’

Drowning in the sea. Sinking in mud. Standing in front of mountains or in the middle of a crowd. Overburdening could come in many shapes.

‘For you, Helen, it might feel like an explosion. What do you think lit the spark?’

Silence, long and dull. It is a straw, a single one, that breaks a donkey’s back, and a single trifle that ignites a spark. They only break heavily burdened backs, single straws, and little things only cause explosions if there is enough explosive at the end of the fuse.

‘I don't know what it was exactly, that's why I'm talking to you.'

She sounded offended. Snotty and defiant.

‘Well, what happened the day the bomb went off? Something so painful, perhaps, that you had to blow it up to stop yourself from feeling it?’

Pale sunlight at seven. Pigeons: brooding outside. The neighbors: noisy at breakfast. Laughing children, whose voices had faded behind thin walls around 7:30 am, and thereafter: sudden silence. As usual, she had been working until four. In content management, like every other day. Pointless campaigns, and on the horizon the sun had slowly been receding as she had gotten to an end.

‘It was a normal day. Nothing special, just like any other day in this goddamn year.’

An alert sigh on Dr Scherer’s end.

‘What about this year, Helen, causes you frustration?’

Days which were standing still, and holding her captive as if in an obstructed roller coaster. The same belts that used to keep her from falling during the ride had all at once become a cage.

‘Well, just take a look around,’ she bleated, ‘I cannot even come to your practice.’

‘You feel restricted and powerless, do you?’

‘Of course I do, don't you?’

Conversations like these were the worst. When you were not being understood, but turned into something you had never been in the first place. In the eyes of the other person, you would suddenly be a lunatic who complained about normality and moaned incessantly about things that couldn't be changed.

We are in the same boat, Helen kept hearing everyone tell her: a lie. Living in different worlds, how could you possibly even embark on the same?

‘You know, Helen, our thoughts and feelings are still in our own control, and they are what shapes our world.'

And about the real one out there nobody cared anymore. They had switched off reality like a bad movie that you would, straight after watching, only want to forget.

‘New age bullshit,’ Helen scoffed. ‘That’s exactly why we have been disenfranchised in two seconds. Because most people actually enjoy sitting on their asses, letting others decide for them. And you know what? I even understand it! It takes a lot of pressure off, in a century that overwhelms you with stupidities like the milk decision in the supermarket. But without personal decisions and responsibilities, how can a life still be called a life?'

The wrong men. The wrong friends. The wrong jobs. Gambling, drugs, and alcohol. Hardly anyone had made more wrong decisions in life than Helen, and now that she couldn't any longer she missed it: the liberating feeling of being seduced into doing the wrong, and even the heaviness of heart that came thereafter.

‘What is life to you, Helen?’

It sounded like a simple question, but it was the most difficult of all, and at the same time the most important, because personal happiness depended on nothing as much as on the answer.

‘Unpredictable and dynamic,” was Helen’s, ‘probably a bit risky and... Well, just alive.’

‘The life you are living at the moment is not lively enough for you? Why?’

Helen kept silent. Not in the way you would when you have to think about it, and neither was she silent like someone who knew nothing to say. Much rather her silence was that of the misunderstood.

‘You know what?’ Dr Scherer asked and didn’t even wait for her to answer. ‘I think you've had a wrong idea about life, ever since several people you knew took their own.’

Traumatized by strung up bodies in dark basement compartments: two in number, before Helen had turned 18. She hadn’t found any of them: hadn’t even seen them. Only in nightmares, after she had found out. The very moment she had, had been the first to ever shatter her heart. It had happened in her mother's kitchen on a freezing winter day. The air: full of ice. Her head: full of anger, and her chest: filled with guilt.

It remains broken. Much like a bone: although the fracture thickens, it hurts as soon as winter arrives. In fact, afterwards, life isn’t ever the same. On some days it is, because sometimes you wouldn’t think of it, but then it would suddenly sting again, reminding of itself.

‘You know, Helen, some ideas about life become pathological. Particularly after traumatic events.’

Is there any word, meaning less that could be more destructive? What was pathological, anyway? For a person with a pathological idea it would always be the others.

‘Helen, do you remember when we talked about survivor's guilt? How hard it used to be for you to still be here, once they were gone?’

Left behind like a penny that had lost its value: a useless relic from a bygone era that no one else remembers. Dial telephones, gameboys, horse-drawn carriages: hardly anyone knows what to do with them anymore. Nowadays they serve no purpose. At most, they are being kept as souvenirs of a past that keeps fading before the eyes until the last piece of it dies.

‘You felt lost in this world back then, Helen, because the foundations of your own were suddenly ruined. Life like you had known it was over. You were the only one left, and had to build something new.’

That she had done: from ruins, she had built a fully alive and breathing new life that would leave her breathless. So much so to fill those with pride who she had lost. The best people she had ever known, and perhaps it was always the best who stood perplexed before a huge pile of future, since they were the only ones who would care about what it would bring at all.

‘What are you on about?’ Still, Helen sounded snotty. ‘I'm proud of my life, in case you were wondering.’

‘Or are you only proud of it because you think the others would be? I think you’re trying to live for both of them just as well. You probably feel like you have to experience enough for the three of you together. That's an enormous pressure, and you can't reconcile it with the circumstances of the crisis.’

Well... Barely anything was reconcilable with the crisis.

The virus is anti-democratic, the German chancellor had said when, encouraged by applause, she had made virologists into dictators. Of course they had been applauding her for it. Who wants to make decisions in a world like this? Only madmen, perhaps, because freedom demands responsibility, and giving it up feels like the greatest liberation of all.

‘You know what, Helen? It shouldn't be your responsibility to live for people who no longer wanted to be alive. Even if it were with a whole mountain of adventures and experiences: you cannot convince them anymore that, by leaving, they've made a wrong choice.’

A moan.

‘I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.’

‘Fair enough, but you cannot deny you’re trying to live for them.’

In the pouring rain on the highest mountains: no rope, no fear, and sliding over wet rocks on her knees, always only a grip away from falling. In ecstatic love play on the open road, and brought to her knees by burning passion. Dr Scherer had a point: maybe Helen couldn’t deny it. She lived from the heart, lived with every fiberShe hadn’t always done it, though.

After her favorite people had done it, Helen too had given up life, as if it were a low-paid job. Death is a funny thing. When someone dies, the sun rises the next morning, as if nothing has happened, and punctually it sets again at night. Even though someone is dead, the train platforms are just as busy as before. Someone has died, and the people simply go on with their daily lives. They meet up with loved ones in the evening, and continue to complain about the coffee that burns their lips, the boss who won't give them a break, the partner who almost suffocates them with love.

When someone dies, the world keeps on turning - without them, because they’re dead, not that it would really make a difference. Only for those who they leave behind it does: they’re stuck in a world that keeps on turning and only makes them sick, because their own is suddenly frozen. Trauma feels clammy. Like damp clothes that make you shiver on cold winter days, and at some point, it feels like nothing anymore, as the dampness turns to ice over time.

In an attempt to preserve the dead, Helen had frozen her life. One day, though, she had freed it again. With an ice pick, and sheer force. It had hurt, and had been tiring, but eventually worth it. No one should have to apologize for a breathing, breathtaking life they have freed from eternal ice by a million blows!

‘What's wrong with wanting to live?’ She scoffed. ‘If I didn't, I could have left with them, instead of accepting that I have to go on without them.’

‘Have you, though,’ Dr Scherer took a dig, ‘accepted it, I mean? Or are you only fine as long as you provide for excitement to compensate for their deaths?’

When doctors start talking medical, it's time to go.

Helen didn't want to say anything back. Left by hope, she left the line. There is always something to hope for, you would tell yourself, as if it were thrown somewhere onto the street, like a lost key that would only be waiting to be found by searching hands.

What if you don't see it, though? The key in front of your feet? You could mistake it for rubbish and trample over it. Beneath the sun, the broken cap of an old can shimmers just the same, and maybe that’s what hope really is: junk that shines in the morning light, as if it were of worth.

Thoughts like these must have been on their minds, just before they’d left: the friends who Helen had lost like dogs that you don't pay enough attention to, and suddenly they’re on the road where they’re hit by trucks.

If you had paid more attention it could have been prevented, you would be thinking afterwards. It could have been averted by a single word, a gesture, a little thing. For months you would reproach yourself. You’d hardly sleep, barely ever eat, and keep on wondering whether you still deserve the life your blood-stained hands are clutching. And as long as you would be wondering you wouldn’t treat yourself to one.

You wouldn’t allow yourself to live anymore. The memory of old times would haunt you incessantly, and suddenly it would change its color. What you would still remember would only be the things that have announced it. Little things that you should have recognised: tears on drunken summer nights, empty looks in busy rooms, car rides full of silence, and words that sounded like goodbye.

You become more attentive, once people in your circle have taken their lives. Helen had become just that, and if it hadn’t been for that, her past year would have taken an entirely different course.

Tom. When they had met, he’d had it in his eyes: the kind of emptiness that would haunt you like a ghost, because you’d see it only in those of suicides. Up to this day Helen had seen it only four times in her life. Most recently: in Mrs Brandtner's.

Green eyes she had, the color of hope, but the emptiness had swallowed up the green, leaving hardly anything to hope for. Faced with a void like that, you’d want to fill it. It would call out to you, late into the night, until you wouldn’t be able to withstand it any longer. In the night to come, Helen barely slept. The emptiness in Mrs Brandtner's eyes crept through her dreams, and woke her every hour. Perhaps a punishment for all the things she could possibly change about it, and maybe just as well for all of those she had committed.

At dawn - birds were singing - Helen could no longer stand her punishment. She left the bed, shortly afterwards: the house, and fled into the sleepy streets, where she wandered around like a conjured spirit, searching for redemption.

∞∞∞

Clear and cold, morning dawned. Upon Helen it started dawning just as well. She was still wandering around, when the streets slowly came to life. It wasn't an accident, she heard the people whisper in the sharp light of day. Somebody had run Paul Brandtner over.

Things that were being said in town wouldn’t always be true. You'd rather make up your own mind than believe their whispers, and the attempt to see for yourself looks like Helen was looking. Once again she found herself at the Brandtner house. This time: directly in front of it. With a sympathy card in her trembling hand, and why she was even trembling she couldn’t really tell.

For a while she was standing in the garden with the curlicue fence. Then: in front of the blue door, where she stopped breathing until the leaf suddenly moved. Through a tiny crack, the blank stare that only suicides have pressed out to her.

‘Are you here for the children?’ Mrs Brandtner's voice crept through. ‘I know their grandparents called someone to look after them, but that was before they knew they would have time for them.’

Helen shook her head and nearly dropped her card.

‘No, I... knew your husband.’

‘Paul?’ The door opened fully. ‘Knew him, how?’

Actually, not at all. but atomised hearts want what they want, and Helen’s kept leading her here: behind the curlicue gates of a suburban garden.

‘We didn't know each other well, but I just... wanted to ask if there was anything you needed?’

Anything, except for the father of her children, their routines, their everyday life. Something like…

’You wouldn’t happen to bake a lot, would you?’

’Baking?’

Silence for a while until Mrs Brandtner sighed.

 ‘I was going to make a cake for the children, but I don’t usually bake, and could use the help.’

Helen didn’t usually bake either. She nodded even though, trying to fill the emptiness in Mrs Brandtner's eyes, and sleep peacefully next night. Minutes later, she found herself next to stirrers and pots in the kitchen - an expensive one - where she tried to mend broken hearts with sticky sugar.

Between stirring and kneading, she was worried that her lie would come to light. Not as regarded the baking. What she worried about would be much harder to stomach than buggered up cakes.

∞∞∞

‘Barely anyone comes to visit, lately,’ Helen heard Mrs Brandtner say, kneading dough, ‘except for the police, of course.’

Unlike her eyes, her voice wasn’t empty. Neither was it desperate: rather pleasant, as if it wanted to promise that things were going to be alright and, for a moment, Helen was tempted to believe it.

‘That sounds… lonely,’ she replied, poking at a cup of icing. ‘Hopefully you’ll get closure soon.’

Mrs Brandtner put the spoon aside. She preheated the oven - soft whirring – and folded her arms.

‘I don't know if we actually need to know.’

Her words came so delayed that they hardly had context.

‘It wouldn't change anything, anyway. I’d still be alive, and Paul would still be gone.’

Sometimes ignorance can be a blessing in disguise. In fact, some lies are being told for good reason. The truth isn’t always the right choice: it can just as well do harm. Even so, Helen rarely lied. Maybe she did about baking, but not about anything significant. She didn't want to do it today either. What she did, instead, though, was keeping silent.

Was there even a difference?

She hushed up truths that wanted to live and breathe out there, and what Mrs Brandtner said to her made her feel like she had to keep it up.

‘It's funny,’ her soothing voice fell upon Helen as she put the cake in the oven, ‘you think you know someone, but then they die, and that is when you realize that you didn’t actually see them for who they were.’

Helen nodded. People only get real, once they are gone., because as soon as they die they can no longer hide. Along with their bodies, the people they pretended to be disintegrate. Who they would have liked to become no longer matters, and what remains is what they actually were: a puzzle of contradictions that no one ever noticed, but everyone who knew them has a piece.

Helen didn’t have any pieces of Paul Brandtner. She hadn’t known him enough for that. Yet she had something about his life that no one else possessed: the truth about his death.

Time was passing slowly in the expensive kitchen. There was suddenly so much of it that - between stirring and kneading - Helen started wondering why she had come at all, if not for the things she was now concealing.

Although to her, the minutes seemed to stop ticking, they kept on moving outside. Before she knew it, it was late, and suddenly she was back on the other side of the curlicue gates: set to venture out into the night.

‘Thank you,’ Annika Brandtner said to her. ’Being pitied all the time would just drive you nuts, you know, but it was different with you today.’

Helen would always be a welcome guest, she added, and that next time, she better bring a bought cake.

When she vanished out the door that night, the cake was burnt, her heart: still atomised, and her lie: still secret. Only one thing had changed in the past hour: to her, Mrs Brandtner was no longer the widow with eyes that only suicides have. Between burnt cake and lumpy icing, she had grown closer to Helen's atomised heart, and if it hadn't been in atoms, it might have broken for her, because no one likes to see good people hurting.

Perhaps Helen had secretly been hoping not to like her. At first she had even tried to make an effort, so she wouldn’t. Barely any conversations, no physical contact, and for some time hdf strategy had worked, but then the sharp kitchen knife had put a spoke in her wheel.

She had cut herself on it. Thick blood on fresh cake, and Mrs Brandtner's reaction to it had warmed Helen to her. No anger: not over the bloody cake, and neither over the doctoring. Instead, she had only been laughing. Restrainedly, at first, but guffawing, shortly after.

‘At least, we can get rid of the lumpy icing now. I bet your blood tastes much better than this gloop.’

Wetting a stranger's cake with blood would break the ice immediately, and with the blood, you would lose a bit about yourself as well. Maybe it is just easier to open up to others once a knife has opened your flesh, and opening up, Helen had come to realize that herself and Annika were quite alike.

They both thought only little of the dying life in a new reality. Both liked to read old books in the early mornings, went for late night runs, and their favorite scent was recently fallen rain on freshly cut grass. Perhaps they could have been friends in another life: might even become it in their current. If it weren't for the truth that Helen was hiding.

∞∞∞

It was with mixed feelings that Helen went home from the Brandtner house that day. She was almost back at her place, but when her terraced house showed between the gardens in the distance she suddenly started dreading the moment her key would crack into the lock.

What would she find at home, except the silence of the night, and the agitated beating of her heart?

Although she was freezing, she wasn’t feeling like going back to a flat where the night and her heart would constantly remind her of the truth.

There was a store at the end of her street. Not a supermarket: a corner shop, small, with messy shelves, and only one sort of milk. Helen didn’t need more than one. Actually, she didn’t need any: lactose intolerance, and in her coffee, she couldn't stand contamination.

She didn't actually have to buy groceries every day, but would go daily, anyway. Inside the shop she’d sneak through the rows and sometimes she’d clean up. In passing, when the milk would ask her for it. The cashier considered her a thief, and looked disappointed every time she didn't steal a thing. Maybe she would do him a favor one day and slip something in: a carton of milk, perhaps.

So far, she was only walking up and down the shelves, and pushing milk A a bit to the side, so milk B would get a fair chance not to spoil there. Put in the first row, it would perhaps be taken home by someone. For a coffee that would not taste, not look, and not steam like it, but had its crowd, nevertheless

Having ensured equal opportunities on the milk shelf, Helen would normally look at the fruits. Sometimes she’d buy an apple, pay, and leave the shop through the fogged up front door. The rusty cowbell would give a dull ring, and Helen would be back outside, where she’d take a bite off her apple, and watch the open flesh turn brown.

She’d rarely finish eating it, as it would usually taste like nothing: at most, maybe spoiled, because the corner shop at the end of her street was no real supermarket and the deliveries kept coming in rarer, since people would only rarely come grocery shopping there

On her way to and from the shop, Helen usually passed Mrs Mueller's window, and stopped at its squeak. Not so often, lately. In the crisis it barely ever opened. Someone had snitched on Mrs Mueller, and told the police she kept inviting people inside. Not a trivial offence, in a year of longing: having tea with anybody else could make you into a murderer, nowadays.

The traitor had been an angry neighbor who had never understood Mrs Mueller's nature. He had probably only been trying to take revenge for a story that her window had sucked in and spit out again at its next opening.

What a denunciator! The year of longing bred them, like chickens that loudly cawed at the slightest conspicuousness. They always used to exist but not in this amount, and Helen had only disgust for them.

Apart from Mrs Mueller, there was hardly anyone she would regularly talk to. Who could be trusted was no longer clear, and since Mrs Mueller had stopped to open her window, Helen had been lacking social contact. 

She missed the squeaky hinges, and the creaky voice that incessantly dug for information. When she suddenly heard it between eggs and milk in the corner shop by the end of her street after her visit to Annika, she started smiling underneath her mask.

‘Oh, dear, are you feeling better? I thought of you almost as often as the poor Brandtners.’

Despite social distancing rules Mrs Mueller moved closer.

‘Did I hear you were at their house today?‘

How she could have already known about Helen's visit was a mystery, but this was just what Mrs Mueller was like. When Helen started nodding, she raised her eyebrows.

‘Are you sure that’s good for you, dear? It mightn’t be the best idea for you of all people to hang around their place.’

Helen's smile froze. Her arms crossed, and the eyebrows drew together.

‘Me of all people? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Oh, you know… You're on thin ice with them, dearest. Be careful, or you will break in.’

It sounded omniscient, and unusually cold. A threat? Helen swallowed.

‘I only offered my condolences like everyone else.’

‘I know, dear, but you're the last person who should be doing that, don't you think?’

All at once: dead silent. The buzz of the freezer in Helen's back was the only sound. Until Mrs Mueller sighed a soft sigh.

‘I'm just saying, you're not well yourself, dearest. Their suffering shouldn't concern you.’

Helen froze. Because of the freezer and because of her heart, the atoms of which suddenly rose into her eyes.

‘Well, I'm not exactly doing brilliantly but compared to the Brandtners I can't complain, I guess.’

A nod.

‘Probably not. But, look: at least, they’ll find the culprit soon. Today they were in our street, even at my house.’

‘Oh yeah?’

Surprise detained Helen's eyes: they widened.

‘Yes, in the late afternoon,’ Mrs Mueller nodded, ‘I sent them on to you, but you weren't at home.’

‘Sent them on to me?’ Swallowing, Helen returned Mrs Mueller's gaze, as if she were trying to pressure her into a reply. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Well, they wanted to know who I saw on the day of the crime.’

They hadn’t seen each other that day. Helen's eyes went blank.

‘You may not have seen me,’ Mrs Mueller added, as if to clarify, ’but I sure saw you.’

Nothing would escape her eyes. Neither the small nor the big things.

Helen should have known! Should have known that only ghosts remain invisible!

‘Where did you see me?’ she asked, with twitching eyes.

‘Well, where do you think?’

For a while it was silent. Even the freezer didn’t make a sound. In and out, in and out, faster and faster. Helen started hyperventilating. She felt dizzy, could barely breathe: oxygen was low. Until finally: a sigh on Mrs Mueller's side.

‘I saw you when you got home, of course. In the afternoon. After that, you switched off the lights and went to bed, I told them.’

Helen remembered the day in question most clearly. How could she not? Home from a walk around five. The lights she hadn’t put out, though, and neither had she gone to bed - at any stage that night. 

Foggy and late, when her phone had started ringing, and suddenly the stars had been shining brighter. Tom's voice at the other end. His raspy, breaking voice that used to stop the world for her whenever it would say her name. Used to. It had no more thereafter

‘I told the policemen how depressed you were at the time because of your Tom,’ Mrs Mueller added. ‘It's a good thing you went to sleep, dear. Otherwise, who knows: you might've done something stupid in your condition.’

‘Right,’ Helen murmured, ‘who knows.’

With a heart that beat no more, she left Mrs Mueller standing between the shelves, and dragged her feet on. For half an hour she stared into cucumber boxes, reminiscing about the night the police were investigating. Still tormented by thoughts, what she finally bought was marble cake. Not the cheap sort for 99 cents, but the expensive kind for a few Euros. At some stage, she’d take it to Annika Brandtner. As if it were enough for everything she owed her.

The truth costs considerably more than a nicely wrapped cake, although it is harder to stomach. If Helen were to serve both together - the truth with a slice of cake - it might leave a sweet instead of bitter taste in Annika Brandtner’s mouth.

Probably she should have listened to Mrs Mueller: no more planning visits, no more buying cake, and no more impositions. After all, there is already enough to do, once your husband dies: especially, when the police investigate and the children keep demanding cake.

Absent-minded, Helen paid, the cowbell rang, and she stood on the streets again. A dog was playing in the meadows. She saw it, but felt nothing. Somewhere at the end of the street, children were laughing, and although she heard it, she felt nothing.

Standing lost in front of the shop and her own life, she tightened her grip around the cake. Her fingers squeezed it like a pillow until it almost crumbled.

‘You're the only person who feels things just as much as I do,’ she remembered to have once told Tom. ‘So much that you can hardly stand it. That’s what has screwed you up so much.’

Drugs, alcohol, withdrawal: Helen had been on about all of it when she’d said it, and all of it he’d brought with him when they had last seen each other: the night Paul Brandtner had died.

Until then, Helen hadn't appreciated how much her feeling too much meant to her. Too little was so much worse than too much. Now she felt a lack of everything, which people would, at some stage, notice. She wouldn’t be able to hide it forever: neither her atomised heart nor the truth that she was trying to keep concealed by gritting her teeth.

∞∞∞

‘Something's up with you! Why are you unusually quiet? Just spill it now!’

A single sip of cheap red wine - warm in the finish. It didn't take Carmen more than that to notice Helen's lack. She had known her the longest: ever since hopscotch on noisy playgrounds and colorful bracelets, breaded in stuffy classrooms during detention. 

In the crisis the two of them would meet up secretly, and break the curfew late at night. But like a two-headed monster, the present towered in between them and made it difficult for them to still communicate.

They didn’t agree on the world anymore, and blanked it out, as if it weren’t real. All of a sudden, they wouldn’t trust each other at the darker corners of the way, and when they would talk their conversations would exclusively be about a past during which they'd still been close.

‘Fair enough the crisis is getting to you,’ Carmen said after her first glass of wine, ‘there's something else, though. I sense a broken heart.’

A broken heart could have been mended over a glass of wine and a friendly conversation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as that.

‘The thing with Tom,’ Carmen added, ‘you know, at some stage stuff like this just gets on top of you. Especially you, who's had so many disappointments. I mean, raped at sixteen! That's bound to leave a chip on your shoulder. I actually always thought this might be why you keep looking for guys who aren’t good for you.’

Some memories aren't worth remembering, but keep coming back. A musty pond in dense darkness. The sound of softly crying owls, and the image of a starry sky above that would keep and keep on shining bright, despite the cruelties that happen underneath.

Cold and wet. Unusually so, for May. Probably due to the lake, on the overgrown banks of which Helen had lost her self-worth. Rubbing against her wrists, the cold grass had kept on growing warmer as she’d desperately been trying to break free from the grip, with which he had fixed her down. 

All the while, she’d been feeling the barrel-chested pressure of a body on top of hers. In the air: the smell of mildew, mixed with exhalations, and tropical scents: of the air freshener he used to have in his car. Its vapor had lingered on his worn out leather jacket.

Nearly fainting, she’d stopped struggling and just let it happen: in the silent hope, he would climb off of her, and she would just be able forget it. She had: not repressed, not processed, but forgotten about it. Forgotten things, however, aren’t forever gone: they have a way of returning to you. Sights, smells, sounds. Every single sense can conjure up a memory, and then the pictures would build up in front of you again, like an angry giant.

‘That has to have been traumatizing,’ Helen would be told. ‘Not really,’ she would only answer, because she didn't want to be traumatized.

She wanted to be stronger, and once you believe in things long enough, they are what you become. Thinking of it nowadays, Helen felt stronger. As long as the lights didn't fade, and no one came too close. As long as she kept control, and didn't have to feel bodies on top of her own.

She used to always have to be the one to make the decisions. Until Tom had come along. He’d changed everything: the only person whose touch she’d ever craved. With whom everything had been feeling free, not staged. With whom she no longer had been feeling like having to play a role. Only with him, she’d ever been in a flow, and with him alone, had she ever felt safe enough to let go.

Carmen shouldn’t have said anything against the thing with Tom. It could have been a good thing: would have been just that, if he had allowed himself anything good. Helen would have loved to reply exactly this, but kept silent. Noone would ever understand, and she didn't trust Carmen enough to expect sympathy from her.

‘It’s still weird to me that you didn't grow old with Dennis,’ Carmen switched the topic to the past.

Dennis, Helen's first. Sometimes, reading his social media posts, she started wondering if he would, just like herself, still think of summer evenings in empty car parks, when he saw her. If he could still smell the stale gone water at the locks where they used to meet on balmy nights. If the taste of sour pickles and bitter liquor reminded him of her just as much, as it reminded her of him, and if she was still 14 to him, just like to her he would forever be 16.

When Carmen went on talking, she looked at Helen so intensely, it almost hurt: ‘Back then when he left it really tore my heart out.’

To this day, Carmen resented him for having left Helen, after everything they had endured. She just refused to understand why Helen had forgiven him.

Others only ever have a tiny sliver of truth, and build their own from it. What has really happened, though, they won't ever know. As for Helen and Dennis: Carmen had no clue, and even Helen's piece to the puzzle of truth wouldn't add up to a coherent picture without the pieces Dennis held.

Helen’s truth was simple. She thought of him as her first, and no one ever forgets them. Funny, because the first is rarely ever the one. With the first, you don’t yet even know what you are looking for. Things are easy for the first: easier than for all the others, and the last has it the hardest. That may be how you know that he's the one.

They had grown up together, Helen and Dennis. She’d met him in between old fairground booths and rusty bumper cars, lights on every corner and the air: scented with roasted almonds. Back then, every girl used to want him, and he used to have many, but wouldn't fall for any.

His first ‘I love you’ had come unexpectedly. Years after Helen's first letters to him, and long after he’d taken her virginity, just before midnight at a party. In a locked bedroom at the bottom of gray carpeted stairs, and all the while someone had kept knocking on the door.

It hadn’t been painful. Only the rejection thereafter had been, but nowadays Helen wouldn’t even still have called it pain. Much rather she'd have called it unpleasant, like a mosquito bite on a balmy summer night, and then you’d wipe them with a cloth, and just keep going.

‘Do you remember the day you got together?’ Carmen laughed ‘I threw up all over the curtains at his parents' house. That was how much vodka his mother gave us, and the soup made everything worse!’

Of course Helen remembered. The same night, he had first confessed his love to her. She hadn’t really wanted him then, and nowadays hardly knew why she’d taken him even though, a few weeks later. Longing for love, she might have just been willing to believe that one day he’d become her one and only. He'd never become that, but a long one. They’d lasted as long as ten years, four flats, two cats, a few deaths, and an engagement.

Growing up, they’d outgrown each other, like you would grow out of an old pair of shoes. You don't dispose of them immediately, if they used to be your favorites Even when they start pinching and the soles start coming off, you would keep them in your wardrobe for a while: reluctant to look for replacement, since you never know if your feet will ever get used to walking in others.

They should probably have separated sooner. What they used to have was friendship and had only ever become more than that, because they’d really wished for it to be. Often love is merely the wish for it: just an illusion. Without the wish, the strongest feelings remain powerless: such as the emotions between herself and Tom. He liked Helen, she was sure of it, but hated her for it. That was how much he wished he didn't have to like anyone.

With both of them, Dennis and Tom, it had ended on a similar note: ‘I met someone and want to try it with her.’

Dennis had said it to her one day in spring - more than a decade ago. Crocuses had come bursting from the remnants of snow, and although Helen had been wanting to say the same thing for months, the very moment he had uttered it, it had felt like those words would take her life.

It had actually been at stake, at the time. As Dennis had ended their life together, she'd been fighting for her own. A stroke in her early 20s. She'd just left the hospital , would have to go to the next, and later on: another one.

‘You deserve better than this: than me, if I don't recover.’

She used to scream it at him: used to cry and fight to push him away. He’d long ago started slipping through her fingers anyway: she’d clearly felt him fade. And it was true to this very day: she would have wanted better for him - secretly, perhaps for herself as well. But he wouldn’t leave, when she would ask him to, and when he finally had left she wouldn't want to let him any longer.

‘Quite extreme. You couldn't even walk, when he dumped you. Thank God, or you’d have run after him!’

That Carmen would ever joke about it, had just as little been foreseeable as whether Helen would ever recover. From the seizure and the grief of a thrown away life: both equally heavy on her heart. So heavy that she’d had to stay busy for the first year in order to even want to keep the life she’d been fighting for.

Day after day, night after night, it used to be one and the same. From nine o'clock in the evening, it'd be a bar two streets away, with remnants of red paint on the decaying walls, and on the seats: guests who couldn't stand themselves. Drinking, they would just be sitting there in silence until the barman would urge them for their order.

‘A tequila shot and a slice of lemon on the side,’ Helen used to order the same every night and ordering, she’d be smiling at guys, although she wouldn't feel like it.

When they’d smile back, she’d feel good for a little while. Good enough to be loved by someone at some stage in her life, and she would throw them covetous glances from sparkling eyes. Actually, she wouldn’t want any of them, but wouldn’t want to feel lonely either. So she'd choose one of them per day, sit down next to them, and sip her tequila, sucking on her lemon slice. Half an hour later, she’d usually undo her hair, and throwing red curls and fire glances over her shoulder, she’d stumble down the hallway, at the end of which Bonnie and Clyde would gawk at her from a filthy looking bathroom door.

In her back, she’d feel the drunken eyes of her chosen one. He’d follow her, and they wouldn’t leave a thing on the counter, except for an empty glass and a half-empty beer which would look just as lost as Helen.

She’d expect the guy in the toilets, and as soon as he’d come she’d make him come in front of the dirty mirrors. Moaning and sweating, she’d look over his shoulder and see herself. She’d tear his back open and see herself, wrap her legs around him and see herself. Until she would avoid her own stare from the smudgy glass, no longer able to withstand it.

‘I'm Martin, by the way,’ the chosen one would say and he could have just as well been David, Michael, or Mark.

Disinterested, Helen would send her hair flying back and just leave him there, because a name is just a name, and it would not even stay the only one she would seduce in the course of the week. 

Who they were, what they were called, what they did for a living would be as irrelevant to her as natural disasters at the other end of the world, or days when nothing really happens. The only thing she’d be interested in would be her own eyes in the mirror: how empty they’d look, and as long as it would stay this way she’d come in front of dirty mirrors, drunk on tequila and gagging on her lemon slice.

For the rest of her night she’d sit at the bar, doing nothing at all, except stare into the void and shred stained coasters. She‘d keep her eyes on the pieces of what used to be a whole, and let them slide onto the counter like freshly fallen snow. From time to time, her stumbling fingers would stop the coaster snow on its way over the edge, and sweeping over the shreds, she’d cut herself. Every now and then, she’d lose a bit of blood, but she would keep on sweeping anyway. Until the shreds would cuddle up to each other in a colorful heap, held together by red, as if her blood could make them whole again.

Faster and faster, her cold fingers would sweep until the barman would murmur something like, ‘What the fuck? What’s this mess about? It can't stay this way!’

Saying it, he’d toss her a rag. Flies would land on her cold fingers, and keep sitting there until she’d push the sticky cloth away.

‘It's always the same people here,’ she’d moan, flies on her shoulder bones and tugging at the rag, she’d add: ‘Just give them their booze, they won't care about the rest.’

Scented with tequila and lemon, her voice would chase the flies away. Instead of booze, the barman would only hand out angry looks until Helen would wipe over the shreds, and only spread the pile across the counter. 

Striving for control, she’d withstand the barman’s eyes, yet wouldn’t get him to submit. Then her drunken fingers would sometimes knock a glass, and the barman’s hand would thunder onto the dark wood of the counter, forcing the coaster snow to jump up and down. Usually a few of the shreds would tumble off the edge, and Helen would watch them with a broken heart.

‘Clean it up now, or you're going home,’ the barman would threaten.

His deep voice would start harassing Helen as she’d only keep on staring after death-bound pieces, and after another while, she would just choose to give it up. On unsteady legs she would put her clattering shoes on the ground, straighten up, and rest her elbows on the counter. Only then she would often start feeling intoxicated. 

Staggering and coughing, she would feel the stares of her latest one night stand embrace her from behind, while she’d shake her red curls, trying to shed her drunkenness, like a bra that had suddenly become too tight.

Thereafter, she would throw the barman an evil look from make-up-smeared eyes, turn her backside to the counter, and sweep the blood-stained pile of shreds into her pocket. Staggering, she would be standing there for a little while, and staring all the time, she'd let her knees sink in. 

Once in a crouch, she’d be eyeballed by everyone of the ever-present guests around. They’d be stretching their necks to watch her sweep bloody shreds from the dirty tiles. With gentle fingers on a blackening hand, she’d slip the coaster fragments into her pockets. One by one like the slivers of a torn apart necklace that has still wholesome memories in between its broken parts.

Why in all the world had he just hooked up with this one, her one night stand should now be wondering, but her chosen ones were usually too drunk for that, which was why, with empty-eyes, they’d simply order more liquor. Meanwhile, she would - the pockets full of shreds - fall against the door outside, so the leaf and the night would open their arms. 

On the threshold, she’d sometimes pause to take one last look around: at the brown counter, the formerly red walls, the familiar faces, the sticky floor, and the barman’s bitter eyes. Then her gaze would often fill with the inkling of having forgotten something. Having nothing, though you don't have to worry about forgetting a thing, the cool breath of the night outside would whisper into her ear, and force her out the door. She would just plunge into the dark arms of the shadows, where she’d forget herself and the shreds in her pockets, and everything else.

Only at home she’d pull the coaster pieces out again, and drape them on piles of old newspapers on her window ledges: right next to yesterday’s shreds and the gray gone ones from the days before. As soon as, after nights like this, the next day would drip from the sky, woken by barking dogs, she’d only stare at what used to be a whole. Under her eyes, the shreds would, just like the days of their origin, start mingling on the window sill until she wouldn’t be able to tell them apart any more. 

They would start to flow into each other, so she’d no longer remember the date, the day of the week, or the year. Overpowered by the chaos of shreds and wrapped in morning sun, she’d sit up in her dirty pillows, thinking about the reasons why all the pieces on her window sill just didn't fit together and probably never would again.

Nevertheless, she’d want to keep collecting and clinging to the hope that she would, in some place, eventually find the shreds she was still missing. Until then, she would only want to sit there: in her tiny flat where newspapers piled up until they reached the ceiling, in between mountains of worn-out clothes, and surrounded by death traps of letters, brochures, matchboxes she had brought home from somewhere at some stage.

Because of Dennis Helen used to be where the world ends: at the edge of a disc-shaped earth, and amidst the emptiness, where she’d keep stacking newspapers, so as to make life full again. Where she’d keep drinking, so as to finally fill up. Having lost everything, though, she would just keep on feeling empty. For an entire year.

Nowadays the memory of it seemed surreal. Just like a black and white movie, nearly a century old.

‘You know, what really bothered me?’ Carmen abruptly interrupted the black and white pictures. ‘That you kept meeting up with him even after you separated.’

At the time, it had not only been the meetings during the separation that no one had had an understanding for. What they used to understand even less: Helen’s attempts to keep supporting him. Even emotionally when he’d chosen someone else. To this day, she remembered the clammy sultriness on the passenger seat of his car, when - between burning summer heat and her heavy heart - she had tried to encourage him to love someone else. If you love, really love someone you’d do anything for them, and on the edge of a disc-shaped world, Helen used to be crazy enough to believe in her love for him.

‘I always thought you were only waiting for him to take you back,’ Carmen moaned, draining her glass. ‘Thank God, that wasn’t what happened.’

In fact, back then, Helen would have taken him back without hesitation. When the future is uncertain from one day to the next, you long for a thread of stability. But hers to him had snapped, thank God! All the things she would have missed, if he had been stronger! A whole life that she had grown to love and possibly wouldn't get to keep much longer, because of her atomised heart.

‘Do you actually keep in touch?’ Carmen wanted to know, but Helen hesitated for some time, because ever since Tom she had rarely been thinking of anyone else.

‘Well, it's been ages since I heard of him, but he seems to want to get married now. And have a child.’

Helen too would almost have had a child with him: at 15, and had never thought about having any thereafter. Had had the chance once and passed on it. Only shortly after her stroke, she had suggested it in order to leave something behind in case she wouldn’t make it.

His answer back then had come with their separation: ‘I really want children. But you're suddenly unrecognizable, really weak Sorry now, but that isn’t how I picture the mother of my children.’

Saying exactly this, he’d been standing in front of the windows, spring sun in his eyes. Cruel it could have been called, but sometimes the tone of voice – the up and down of pitch - makes all the difference in the world. He hadn’t been sounding cold, but shaky. Upset, which was why Helen would have called it honest. Honest desperation, perhaps.

‘Don't you think that's getting to you too?’ Carmen asked, dropping more wine into her glass. ‘That he wants to get married and have children, I mean. Maybe secretly you kept hoping it might work out again sometime.’

No, Helen would never take him back. Not after the life she’d come to know without him. Not since she’d known what hurricanes felt like that sent you flying and falling: not after Tom. Actually, ‘after Tom’ sounded like ‘after death’. Awkward and completely out of her scope. It exceeded every realm of possibility. Although it had long ago begun: was starting over and over again, every time she’d leave his place.

‘Honestly, Helen, I'm relieved that you and Dennis didn't grow old together. You used to be so annoyingly selfless with him, and would put his wishes before everything else.’ She was slowly getting drunk and nearly dropped her glass, continuing: ‘No offense, but only cowards refuse to admit they’ve dreams of their own. It kind of makes life so much easier. At least you cannot fail at what you want when you pretend you don’t want anything at all.’

Helen didn’t react, but knew it was true. Most people are cowards who are living their lives in the middle lane, afraid of overtaking. Scared to lose control, to have an accident, to get permanently damaged, or die, they keep driving in the same gear all the time, and would rather stand on the sidelines than take a chance.

The crisis was the latest proof for it. People didn’t really mind submitting to catalogs of unreasonable regulations if they were promised safety in exchange. They prefered believing what they were being told than trusting the things they could sense. That was how they would be going through their lives, avoiding to take sides, and perhaps their feet didn't touch the ground enough for them to ever take a stand.

The longer the crisis went on, the more her life felt like a nightmare to Helen, and all the people in it were beasts. They had probably always been that: everyone all along, and what differed them from each other was only their ability to hide it. This could have been what attracted Helen to Tom. He never hid his beast, but had it playing on the streets, whereas others desperately tried to lock theirs away.

‘You know, Helen,’ Carmen said, sipping her wine, ‘Dennis and then Tom: I keep wondering if you deliberately hook up with guys who don’t deserve you. I mean, somehow you keep picking men who cannot keep up with you. But no one should settle for the worst dish on the buffet, if it’s only because they’re scared of the hot spices in the yummy ones.’

Many people do it this way. It is a good feeling to be superior, and the best of all to get admiration. Maybe in Helen's case a daddy issue was behind it, who knew? She had never been enough for hers. She used to always have to be better: at school, as a daughter, in everything. The thing with Tom, though, had nothing to do with it. What she had with him was something different. Natural magnetism. Maybe for the first time in her life: real attraction.

It just had to be, because: who, but a monster would hurt someone else for a thing that hadn’t ever been real?

For something that didn't have to happen, no one wants to have ruined a love, and the thing with Tom had destroyed Helen’s prior. Her relationship then had been her first try after Dennis, drunken casual sex in front of bathroom mirrors, and piles of coaster shreds on her window ledges.

Back then, she used to have the kind of beauty that second-hand things have. That they are in tatters makes them attractive, and after everything they've endured they'd put up with anything. There’s nothing that they're above doing. They don’t mind getting dirty or torn. Helen’s ex used to love her for that: for the beauty that only used things have. The extremes she’d wanted to live at the time he used to consider the freedom he'd been lacking. For Helen, though, her relationship with him had always only been a giveaway. Once you take it, you don't know what to do with it. For a long time, she’d kept trying to deny it: had tried to repress it. Until Tom.

Back then, she had been sorry for her night with him, but to be honest: happy just as well. Overjoyed and liberated, maybe even proud, because from the start he’d had her heart. He was everything she had ever wanted: a unique treasure and ever since she'd known him, she had defended him as such. She wouldn’t ever be able to let him go. In fact, she hadn’t been when her ex had demanded it, and neither afterwards when herself she had started wishing she could.

‘So you used me to get out of your relationship.‘

Adding that she would yet have to prove him wrong. Tom had manipulated her with this shortly after their night, and even though she had realized it, Helen had chosen to play along. She'd gotten into a music box for him and kept on dancing tirelessly, whenever he would feel like it. To this day, he knew which buttons he had to push to make her. 

In the past year, she had considered taking off her ballerina shoes to leave the box for good. She hadn’t been able to do it, though and was still caught inside. All the things she had given up for what she used to see in him! Without the thought of him, what would she still have been?

‘Sometimes, Helen,’ Carmen said, ‘it seems like you always need a guy you can adore to consider your life bearable. And if there's no suitable fella you take anyone.’

What people love about others is often only how the world feels around them, and what they sometimes love most is the person they are in someone else’s eyes. Or who they could become at their side. At some stage, though, the spell would start wearing off, and suddenly they would no longer see the best in you. That’s what can ruin it. It had ruined things between Helen and her ex, just before she had left him, and it had destroyed her relationship with Dennis, just before he had left.

During the ten years she had spent with him, he would hurt her every day. Who could possibly hurt you if not the person you are handing your heart to? Intentionally Dennis wouldn't have broken hers but like dying wood, it had turned rigid in his hands and started to crack.

He had locked it in a chest. Only when he’d left, he’d taken it back out to give it back, and once clutched again by Helen's fingers, it had splintered at its cracks. Putting it back together had taken her a lot: many meaningless nights, thousands of beer mat shreds, a three year relationship, and a deluge-night with Tom, which had turned into hundreds of them. Because he was it for her: the one to make everyone before them forgotten.

Carmen's wine was nearly empty and so were Helen’s eyes.

‘Tobi will be home from his shift in a few minutes. I don't want to throw you out, but you know how he gets. If he finds you here despite the curfew, he will probably call the police.'

That was the new normality in which everyone showed solidarity - at least as long as it suited them. Helen left. She didn’t need policemen today. After talking to Mrs Mueller she had only gone to Carmen, so she wouldn't have to meet any at her own place.

Saying goodbye, she felt like a fugitive who hid from the moment when, between the silence of her soul and her excitedly beating heart, she would once more have to think about the night Paul Brandtner had died. About the truth she kept concealed inside, and about Tom who had been ringing her ever since.

∞∞∞

It was dark outside. No single star in the sky as Helen left Carmen's house, and the darker it gets the more frightening is a constantly ringing phone. On her way home, Helen turned hers off and suddenly heard nothing anymore. Only hoarse dogs behind high hedges. 

For a moment she listened to them. They sounded strong and could probably have jumped over if they had tried. They didn’t, though: never even tried to escape, because the hedges, dark and dense, didn’t only hold them captive. They protected them just the same, and a little bit of protection is what everyone is longing for. 

What’s alive gives up a lot for safety. Birds that are being fed no longer want to fly. The fastest hunters in the world no longer want to hunt, once they are provided for, and the same went for people.

Pretty much everyone Helen knew were husky dogs behind high hedges. Paralyzed by fear and inertie, they rather hid than overcame what held them captive. Helen used to do it too: she had spent half her life this way. If, leaving, Dennis hadn't pulled her hedges down, she would probably still be sitting there. So many years had passed since then, and on the fair of life, time is a distorting mirror which warps everything it touches.

Leaving her in her worst of times, Dennis had shattered her heart, but almost a decade later none of that was visible. What the mirror showed, instead, was a liberation act. Having left, made him a knight on a white horse - a dragon slayer - and she used to be grateful to him for that. That was until two days ago. 

Nothing had been the same ever since Paul Brandtner’s death. For the first time in years, Helen wished she were still captive behind high hedges. As sometimes their purpose isn’t to protect you from the outside, but those outside from you.

If Dennis hadn't set Helen free, the night two days ago would never have happened, and Helen wouldn't have to be afraid now. Of policemen who could show up at her door at any given minute.