I lost the thought of the meadow around the lake when I heard it. I was probably a few yards away, for it was still very quiet, but the nearer I came, the louder it became, this sobbing and lamenting. Deep in itself, she was sitting under a pasture, pressed to the trunk, as if she were looking for cover. Her sobbing drowned my steps. Shortly I stopped. Perhaps she would calm down, but she seemed to have found no peace for a long time. Carefully I touched her arm. She woke up and looked at me with widened eyes.
„Go away,“ she said briefly.
„And if I do not want? If I want to stay with you? If I stay here with you and comfort you?“, I asked her.
„You will not want that, and I will not. Never will I be consoled again, never again wrapped up and beguiled,“ she replied sharply.
„Yes, but you cannot sit here forever and give yourself to the pain. You have to go beyond it, live again,“ I replied.
„Yes, I can and I will. Do you know how many times I’ve heard that? It goes on, and everything will be well again and you do not need to leave so. And I have believed it, every time, have begun again from the beginning, then ended again, so failed, hurt, humiliated. It’s never going to be any different, so I’ll stay in it, never forgetting that it must always end, always,“ she said sharply, as if there was really no alternative.
„Maybe you are right. Perhaps it really ends up always, and yet there is a beginning and an in-between, the time, in which you were probably also happy and alive, free and open. And you will not experience that again if you remain in pain,“ I tried to hold back.
„Of course it was so, but then why not stay in pain, if it always runs out?“ she asked, and I noticed how slowly she calmed down, more attentively.
„Because the time of happiness, of life, should be that through which you let your life be shaped, not the short time of pain. Let me take you there again,“ I suggested.
„Why should I do that? Why should I trust you? Give only one reason, just one reason why I should give myself the illusion that there is a gift without being hurt,“ she told me.
„The hope and the longing. The hope that we will grow in happiness and pain and understand ever more and more. The longing for the more in the life that exists and that we can give ourselves,“ I replied.
„That can be, but what guarantees that you will not hurt me?“ she asked.
„There are no guarantees and no insurance for happiness or life, only our promise, which we can renew every day, the step we can ever re-place, and the understanding that we are ever working on again,“ I said .
