A Light in the Dark - Part IV
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. The bliss of that experience was short lived and what followed was a dreary emotional desert that left me wondering what was the point of living when we are all just going to die.
THIS IS PART 4 of a SIX-PART STORY
Image: Leyre
I don’t know if I can properly convey to you the horror and ennui of those post-camp weeks -- being snatched from the heights of love and deported to a dreary emotional desert where time crawled and nothing mattered.
The truth is, I was a spoiled, wealthy, white girl who, in the entirety of her short life, had never experienced even a moment of real deprivation. With the gardener gone from my world, there wasn’t a single thing I wanted to do but sit in my room and daydream. I was an addict deprived of her drug and it was painful. My parents had no idea what I was going through and insisted I accompany them on a furniture-buying trip to Austria and Germany. Sounds terrific, right?
Wrong. I shlepped through the streets of Vienna and Munich, following my parents from antiques store to antiques store, bored out of my mind, convinced I’d die if I didn’t get my hands on a pack of cigarettes. At the time, I thought nobody could be as miserable as I was. But I sank into an even deeper despair a few weeks later, when I left for boarding school. Up till then I’d been at a day school that only went through the ninth grade, so I had to switch and I figured that, since this new school was both Quaker and co-ed, it had to be fairly progressive. Here I was disappointed. The place, in the way it treated students, was like a prison camp. If you walked a few feet beyond the main building with a boy, a teacher would come out and yell at you. If you wandered anywhere near the woods, teachers patrolling the area would appear out of nowhere and sniff at your clothes to see if you’d been smoking. Every morning there’d be an inspection to make sure you were in proper attire (skirt, tights, sweater, jacket). At meals there’d be a bleak feeling; the prefect at our table, an overly chatty girl of sixteen, for some reason always wore a trenchcoat and it turned out she was three or four months pregnant.
I learned that a girl had hung herself the year before for the same reason.
While I wasn’t pregnant, I was very affected by the negative atmosphere of the place and started going downhill almost immediately. I simply didn’t thrive there. In the mornings I had to force myself out of bed. I stopped eating. I stopped reading. I didn’t see the point of life -- why continue if one was going to die anyway?
Image: Lucas Pezeta
Basically I flatlined. I didn’t care about anything. As alive as I’d been with my crush on the gardener over the summer, I was now dead inside. And it was dangerous.
Cover photo: Elina Krima