Heal Me

Chapter 12

Damon did not know it, but he was right; he had to read 'Looking for Alaska', for it was now Evangeline who was silently crying, hugging it to her chest. She was lying in her warm comfortable bed, her hair messy and her pajamas all crumpled, reading and re-reading the last few pages of John Green's book.  

 She had woken up around 5:30 A.M. with tired eyes and a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Not being able to go back to sleep, Evangeline stared at a grey spot on the ceiling, her arms under her head, and reminded herself of the promise she had made the night before.  

'Live with it and with myself...' she thought.

"Because there's no other way out..." Evangeline sighed deeply.

'A way out... A way out of this labyrinth. The labyrinth of suffering...'

She quickly threw the duvets off of her and got up. The cold morning air hit her naked arms and feet as she dashed towards the shelves near the window. Her fingers were pale and trembling as she moved them against the carefully ordered books, searching for the one she wanted. When Evangeline got to the title she was looking for, she quickly pulled it out, letting the other ones fall crookedly against each other. Gripping the book tightly, she hurried back to her bed, wrapping herself up in the blankets. Turning on the lamp on the nightstand and biting her lip, she put the nail of her index finger between the very last pages and began reading, her eyes moving from phrase to phrase, skipping paragraphs in her frenetic search for the conclusion of the book and an answer which could help her.

"How will you -you personally- ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? ... What is your cause for hope?" she whispered to herself the Old Man's words and before she went to another line, she stood silent, her lips quivering. What was hers? What was waiting at the exit of her labyrinth of suffering that made everything worth it? What didn't let her choose 'straight and fast' like Alaska might had done?

Evangeline sighed again and took a minute to think. But to her, the answer seemed so obvious: LOVE. Love... a feeling so beautiful, so pure, something that could heal her of her past. Yes... what Evangeline wanted in order to feel better was love, any kind of it: from her family, from her friends, from a cat that would cuddle in her lap and snore. She wanted to experience it for she had read or heard so much about this emotion but still rather rarely got the chance to enjoy love-filled moments.

"After all this time, it seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out - but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it." her lips curved into a small smile as she read the Colonel's reply and flipped the page. He did the right thing; people must not give up on life by acting cowardly, for it is only the power of living our own lives that we have left in the end. We all are in a labyrinth of suffering, sometimes even agony, but we ARE; we are alive.

A few highlighted paragraphs caught her eye so she skipped some more phrases and read to herself:

"I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions..." Evangeline's voice cracked towards the end and she raised her fingers to her lips.

"Oh my God..." she whispered astonished and read again: "... we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth... live with things done and things left undone that day... things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future..." Evangeline murmured and a tear rolled down her cheek. Her heart was beating wildly inside her chest and she closed her eyes tightly as she realized that she was right: she had to accept everything that had happened to her because it was a part of her that was impossible to deny. This was her, the true Evangeline that had been kept hidden underneath a bright, naive smile.

She now understood why Damon had found her so annoying: she forced everything. Deep inside, she was suffering, but she had never showed nor admitted it. It was like she had been bleeding all this time but expected the wound to heal by itself. When she finally realized how severe the situation was, she panicked; she got scared of how much pain and shame she was able to unconsciously endure all these years. How could she do such a thing? How could it be possible to simply ignore it?

"Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost..." she struggled to say in between sobs as she was crying her heart out by now. Evangeline had always thought that people nowadays should listen to their heart more because it is the only thing that can help them when they feel that something is not right.

'What a hypocrite!' she yelled at herself. How on Earth could she do that if her heart was broken in so many little pieces? And because of it, the numbness she experienced while walking towards Damon's car was there all along, waiting for the right moment to make her crumble to the ground. And that made everything hurt so much more; if only she mustered up the courage to glue those pieces together years before...

After a few moments, she gulped and wiped away her tears. Blinking a couple of times, Evangeline continued:

"Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are invincible' with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken..."

Just like the night before, Evangeline was crying, rocking back and forth, hugging the book to her chest.

"I was such a fool!" she shouted in a pillow, racked by sobs. Evangeline wanted to scream and to go to her desk and wipe out everything. She was so angry at herself, so frustrated about the fact that she had practically wasted four years of her life by faking everything.

'...those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.'

"Miles was right. Our souls are indestructible." Evangeline murmured to herself. "No matter what happens, we do not have any good reasons to self-destruct. We must fight the labyrinth... We must fight and not run." she cleared her throat and got up to put the book back on the shelf.

Looking out the window, Evangeline thought of what Alaska went through... And here she was, making so much of a big deal from the fact that a man had touched her four years before. It was awful, of course, the way his rough hand traveled up and down her arms, then her back, and finally the inside of her thighs... but Evangeline was still innocent, even though she did not really feel like that. Worse things could had happened.

'We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken...' she remembered what Miles wrote in his paper. Her thoughts instantly went to Damon and now she knew why she reacted like that when he had first looked at her, for a moment letting her see the overwhelming sadness inside him: she was just as broken as he was. And there was no way Evangeline would forget her own promise; she had to glue together the pieces of his heart as well...