One Year Later

I am sitting in London.

Around me there is a big celebration, a family somewhere nearby, friends a little further away, glasses, voices, laughter, ordinary life. Beautiful music is playing. On the table I have something sweet, and in front of me a drink that tastes more bitter than it should.

And yet I am not fully here.

My body is one year back.

In Italy. At a table over a Martini Spritz. In a time when I still believed that my husband and I were sitting there just the two of us. Today I already know there were three of us there. And maybe, if I am honest, I was sitting there alone even then.

Since this February, I have been feeling worse and worse.

For a long time I did not understand it. I looked for the reason in tiredness, hormones, overload, in myself. But it was not new. It was old. It just came this time with a different force.

My body opened last year and started replaying it again, only this time not as fog, but as a script with subtitles that were written only after the screening was over.

Where last year there was blind pain, today there are images. Hints. Facts. Crumbs that my brain gathered in the meantime and is now putting into a story, because for the brain a story is safer than chaos.

But some stories are not about safety. Some stories are a scalpel.

So I sit in a city of millions, it is Easter, life is pulsing all around me, and inside me an artery is opening. Every thought cuts. Every newly understood connection burns more than the original ignorance did. What back then was only a vague fear is now more concrete. And because of that, crueler.

And that may be the worst thing about betrayal.

Not only that it happened. But that even with time it keeps growing in our heads. The past does not stay in the past, because the brain keeps colouring it in piece by piece.

It goes back to it, replays it, adds details, looks for the places where we could have saved ourselves if only we had known. And then reason speaks up in its cold, tired voice: I told you so.

Reason, in moments like this, is a damned coward. It comes only after the battle. It speaks only when there is already complete silence. And it acts like a genius because it found logic where, back then, there was only bleeding.

But the body remembers it differently. And it remembers it to the bone.

It remembers smiles that made no sense.
It remembers strange tension in the air.
It remembers moments when you felt pushed aside and could not explain why.
It remembers looks, tone of voice, invisible shifts of energy in the room.
It remembers how someone can be kind and cruel at the same time, present and absent, close and completely elsewhere.
How one face can have more versions than an Oscar-winning actor.
How someone close to you turns into a chameleon and you still do not understand.

And so you start thinking the fault is in you.

Too sensitive. Too demanding. Too hysterical. Too much of everything. Just not accurate.

After a year it turns out my body was accurate. It just did not have proof. And without proof, I often do not even believe myself.

This is not a text about me being strong.

Honestly, phrases like that have been getting on my nerves for the last year. Women are strong. Yes, of course we are. We endure unbelievable things. We get up. We function. We cook, we care, we carry the load, we work, we drive, we study, we cry, and we love.

But hardly anyone talks about how high the price of this admired strength really is. How much inner flesh has to be cut away so that the next day we can get up again and act like we are coping.

I am trying to be present. Really.

Studying. Self-development. Gym. Meditation. Breath. Therapy. Small steps.

I am learning not to fall apart every time my brain pulls out another, often intimate, scene. I am learning to separate facts from the story it builds around them.

I am learning to live with the fact that some answers should never have come, and others will come later than a person can bear. And the most important ones will stay hanging in a vacuum.

But there are days when it is simply too much.

Days when it feels as if it is not her murdering me.
Not him either.
It is my own protection system killing me.

My own brain, drawing images, scanning for proof, collecting evidence, building walls, and signing everything with: I am protecting you.

And I would most like to ask it:

Where were you earlier?
Where were you when I needed you years ago?
Where were you when I was learning that love means enduring?
Where were you when I was confusing loyalty to myself with loyalty to others?

Maybe this is the cruelest breaking point of all.

Not when we find out what somebody else did to us. But when we begin to see what we ourselves have been doing to ourselves for so long.

I am sitting in London. Around me people are celebrating, talking, eating, laughing. In front of me is a drink that tastes like wormwood, and my eyes are full of tears.

And still I am sitting here.

Maybe that is my only big truth today. Not that I am strong. Not that I have won. Not that I already know. But that I am here. That I did not walk out of my own life. That I stayed sitting at my own table, even when it tastes bitter.

And maybe this is exactly how it always begins.

Not in strength.
Not in a plan.
Not in an inspiring post about female resilience.
But here.
In the moment when it is no longer possible to keep living in a lie.
In the moment when the body refuses to stay silent.
In the moment when I truly see for the first time that some women are not born from tenderness, but from ashes.

One day we simply put on our boots and carry on.

And by the way, if I were Christ today, I would tell that last Easter miracle to fuck right off.