Our Love Will Be Remembered

Our Love Will Be Remembered... (Ch 18)

Chapter 18

I left again for that summer. I needed to think, I needed to get away.

Why had I decided to pursue Hayisa? She was happy, she loved so many, why had I agreed to walk with her, why had I even let myself love her in the first place to then hurt her?

Hurt her.

That’s was the first time I saw the deed, I saw the killing to preserve the love as something hurtful and not only as a necessity. Even with Lucie and the harvester I hadn’t seen it the way I felt with Hayisa. I had forced her into that faith when I could have just let her be. Should I be forcing love that much? Especially when someone else could have loved her… more than me? Admitting this was completely out of my character but I couldn’t help but think that way because Hayisa had been too full of life to not be alive anymore.

But she wasn’t alive anymore and it was because of me.

I think it was a mix of surprise and bitter arrogance that had made me let go of her hand, after all I could have lived a happier moment with her right? I could have gotten home with her and only kill her the next morning? Was I killing my loves too quickly?

Those were all things I thought about as I left for South America.

I had given my name to work into a rebuilding humanitarian project to help a country that had just lived a great earthquake.

Close from where me and the other volunteers worked there was a small church. I found myself going to that church, almost every morning right after dawn before the work. I had never been a strong religious man, but I think that with my romantic mind it was a given that I had that religious root in me.

At first I wasn’t sure what to do… pray God for forgiveness? That wasn’t what I was looking for; I was seeking peace of mind. Though I knew I should have been looking for forgiveness, I had after all committed many sins.

So every morning I went to church, sat at the pew and looked at the crucified Jesus, and thought, trying to find some kind of mental solace in the so called house of God.

I did found something there, but it wasn’t exactly mental solace…

Maria.

Kind of ironic don’t you think?

Maria was a noun. She was at that church, every day, every single hour of the day. I don’t even know if she left it to sleep or eat.

At first she didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to her, but after a little while, one day, she came to sit beside me. She didn’t say a word either, she just looked at me, smiled and then looked back to the front of the church and went on silently praying like I wasn’t even there.

Our relationship, if you will, evolved that way, really slowly. We just sat there, beside each other, not exchanging a word, one day and the next, Maria was holding my hand, almost as if she thought I had lived some kind of traumatic experience and needed comfort. And in a way I had lived traumatic events, the eight women that I had loved were all dead…

So this went on for a little while, until one day Maria looked at me and instead of looking back in front, kept staring at me. In that instant I was completely confused. I wasn’t sure what to say, what to think, I could just gaze in her eyes and wait.

“You have to pray for something if you want God to give it to you” she had whispered.

The fact that she had spoken to me had left me speechless for a few seconds, “What makes you think I don’t pray?”

She had half smiled at me, “Do you?”

I hadn’t answered to her question. It was useless. She knew I didn’t pray, I knew I didn’t pray, and I was mentally exhausted in a way and didn’t feel like coming up with some snotty reply that would make me intriguing to her.

She didn’t ask anything she simply looked back in front as she always did, not even a smug smile on her lips. Just the peaceful one she always had, her lips moving in prayers. She didn’t find pride in the fact she had been right about me, because pride was simple not a feeling she conveyed.

She was pure. She was good.

And she was the next one I loved.

And killed of course, as if I needed to add this at this point of the story…