Oh, that house!
Saskia shrinks back, because seeing it reminds her of his death. Her eyes shoot open, as if only now she really notices that he died in there while she was there for it.
She was with him when from up close a bullet hit him in the head. She will never forget the impact. His head snapped back, as if the force broke his neck, and what the second two bullets caused she couldn't bring herself to witness anymore. With her eyes closed, she only heard how loud it was when they left the barrel of the gun.
It must have taken her eternities to look at him again and take in the consequences. Aaron, wide open eyed, slumped across the threshold, half inside the room and half out in the hall. He was covered in so much blood that she thought he might float away in it.
Well, maybe he did. She wouldn't know, because she left.
As she is looking at his house from a distance now - at the ivy covered columns that the second floor balcony is throning on, the same ones that she climbed down when she heard a car - her ankle hurts again. Holding on to the ivy twines, her cramping hands lost strength and failed her halfway down. She lost her grip and fell. Her foot nearly shattered on the ground and as the rest of her body landed on top of it, she heard her ankle crack.
Gritting her teeth, she crawled towards the forest. Through grass that was enveloped in dew and past flowers, the heads of which kept on hitting her forehead. On her tongue she could taste adrenaline which probably was why it was only when she reached her hiding spot - the tunnel - that she noticed how dislocated her ankle joint looked. When she tried to put it back in place, she felt a pain like a nail was being hammered into it, but half a day later it was like it had never happened. Thanks to the cold tunnel walls that she had kept pressing it against, the nerves in her dislocated ankle had stopped transmitting sensations into her brain.
Her joint must have healed during the time that she had spent in hiding, because on the long way here she couldn't feel a thing. Only now it starts acting up again, while she is staring at the very spot where she landed in the grass on the day that she fled the flood of Aaron´s blood. The blades of grass are still hanging their heads and depicting the shape of her twisted body that shot down on top of them. Her weight must have broken them in half, they never got over her impact.
How long will it stay that way, she wonders. How long will her impact be noticeable to someone else, and more importantly, have they noticed? The police?
They sealed the doors and windows on this side of the house. Saskia´s eyes jump up and down the barricade tape, yellow and with black letters, which is meant to keep people out. With her hurting ankle she slowly cat-foots around the corner, so she can check the main entrance. She is holding her distance - just as much to the house as to her own memories - and she bends her torso over to make herself smaller than she really is, because no one can see her here. If there is even someone there.
Shouldn't the police be done with their assessment of the crime?
Shouldn't all the evidence have been retrieved while she was hiding? Or could they still be there, their cars parked in the gravel covered parking lot behind the splashing fountain in the front?
When she turns the corner to find out, she slows down, but as the parking space opens up in front of her she hesitates to take her eyes off the ground and look for parked vehicles.
If only she knew how long exactly she was in the tunnel for!
If she only knew how many days have passed since Aaron´s flood of blood!
She hopes it is at least three, then the police would most likely be gone, but her own imprint in the grass suggests that it wasn´t days at all.
Has it only been 24 hours? 1.440 minutes? 86.400 seconds?
Even though it feels impossible, it could be, because time loses relevance after events like Aaron's death. You stop thinking about it, cease to consider it real, start denying its presence, and because it has always only been a theory, all at once for you to whom it doesn't matter anymore, it stops existing. Hours disintegrate to minutes, minutes fall apart to seconds, and seconds dissolve into the air that you end up breathing, until you can feel it restricting your airways. A lump in your throat that consists of the evaporated seconds that you just sucked into your mouth. Time isn't out there anymore, it is what you want to cough up, before it can invade your lungs and kill you from the inside. Out there it isn't moving, it isn't passing, it has stopped, but whenever you try to breathe, it is what you are nearly suffocating on.
For Saskia it was the time that she had spent with Aaron that prevented her from breathing when she saw him dead and gone. Even more, it was the time that they would now miss what she was suffocating on. A time that she had dreamt about. A happy future that had only just begun when the wound in his forehead ended it.
Abruptly she takes her eyes off the gravel and suddenly seems determined to face whatever she will see in the parking lot, because it could either way not be worse than what she had to see the last time she was here.
Nothing. There is nothing to see on the gravel. Only the air, divided by rays of sun in which bees and flies are swirling around. It has to be evening. She can tell by the dying light that looks calmer and calmer, the later it gets. Evening light looks like it carries thoughts. It looks like a person that is weakly smiling at you, when they really want to run off, crying. Like someone who is trying to disguise their pain by what they have been taught is what happy people do, but they wouldn't know, because they have never felt happiness themselves.
Gently wrapped up in the calm and sad smile that is evening light, Saskia slowly walks to the sealed front door. As she feels the warm light embracing her from behind, she thinks of Aaron and the moment that she last embraced him
In her arms, did he ever feel warm, she wonders, when she walks up the three steps to the front door, and if he did, then why is he not here right now? Weak, she thinks. He must have been too weak to fight for what he really wanted: staying by her side. Of course, he was, how did she never notice? It clearly was his weakness just as well that wouldn't let him leave his wife for her.
That is, at least, what Saskia´s mind chooses to believe, so she doesn't have to face the truth. It has only ever been her own yearning that she saw reflecting in Aaron´s eyes, while beneath her own reflection his stayed void and clear. She saw him how she wanted to see him, heard him say what she wanted to hear, thought he felt what she wanted him to feel. Because when meeting someone else, it is the mind that creates the person you see in front of your own eyes, and even when they end up showing you that they are really someone else, you will choose to stay blind to it. Otherwise, how would you be able to live with them, and more importantly: with yourself?
Saskia made Aaron into who she wished he would be and deeply believed that he was what she saw in him, the person that she had always loved.
The person that she had spent a decade of her life creating in her head, before they ever met.
A person who would doubtlessly agree to love her back.
However, wrapped up in the thoughts that live in evening light, she isn't sure about it any longer, she feels doubts.
But if he has never been who she saw in him, could he still have loved her then? How would she ever be able to admit to herself that, perhaps, he never did?
She'd lose everything that she has ever thought to have if she had to give up the illusion of the man that she has solely been committed to for nearly all her life. Until the gunshots hit, she had been driving in a tunnel. On the one way street that was finding him, so she could spend her life with him. Determinedly, straight forward, you could say obsessively she had navigated herself towards him, in the passage that her mind had built for merely that purpose. Admitting that the man she found was never who she was looking for at all, would be hard for her to take. It would leave her empty handed, and make the life she thought she lived into a warped illusion.
Did she live a pointless dream that has turned into a nightmare just before the climax?
Right now she is wondering, but could you blame her that even now, despite the doubts that reality intersects her dreamworld with, she resists the rough awakening?
It didn't just start with Aaron. For all of Saskia´slife what made her days bearable was someone to adore. For as long as she remembers she has dedicated her entire being - every thought, every beat of the heart, and every feeling - to a chosen man. It started in kindergarten, and who they were was never really relevant to her, as long as the smallest thing to do with them reminded her of the man who she has always only failed: her own father.
She hasn't really talked to him in years, because he's always only made her feel like what she did or who she was wouldn't ever be good enough. But someday she would maybe find a man who would be pleased with her, so she was subconsciously hoping and doesn't even know herself that this is what she was doing.
Now she is standing in front of the entrance to Aaron´s house. What's in front of her used to look like the heavenly gates to her that promised reconciliation, redemption and forgiveness. But when she opened the door-leafs last, she went straight to hell, from where she has ever since been trying to escape.
When she recalls what happened behind the two-winged door, she feels no godly redemption or forgiveness at all, but mostly horror. A deadly mix of feelings that is drenched in the pain that death would leave you with, and like petrol raises its explosiveness. Then, all at once, while she is standing there, a spark is lit: A memory falls over her and has her frozen to the spot.
"I cannot do it without you," Aaron´s voice crept out of the phone she was holding on the day he died. "I need you, without you it will fail."
As many times as she had thought to hear him say it when he really had not, this time he actually did and for once he truly meant it.
How could she have let him down?
How could she have said, no?
Driven by the desire to please a man in the way she never could her father, she agreed to help. Aaron was the one who came up with a plan, but he left her in control of it. Her, Saskia, the one and only person who he knew would do whatever he would ask.
He left her in control and now he's dead.
Could Saskia have prevented it?
Without her, could he still be breathing?
Could he now be behind those doors if it weren't for her?
Could she have saved him if she had gone against him?
In front of the sealed door to Aaron´s house it happens from one second to the next. The spark that is her thoughts touches the fuse of the bomb that are Saskia´s emotions, and what follows is an explosion.
She cannot take it anymore.
As if with claws she tears the barricade tape of the police apart. Determined to get inside the house, no matter if the door is locked or not, she starts kicking and banging her shoulder against it. So hard that it leaves bruises and cracks in her toe bones, not that she would even notice. She isn't thinking anymore. She is obsessed with only one thing, getting in, and in order to reach the goal that makes her blind to everything around she would do absolutely anything right now. No matter the consequence, no matter how unreasonable, and disregarding the pain that it causes. A proof to it for everyone to see are her open knuckles and the slowly growing blood stain that is seeping through her sneakers. Despite it, her foot keeps on kicking and her hand keeps on hitting, while her eyes go blank and black.
Even if the door were to give in right now, she would be too obsessed to realise that her goal is reached. She´d keep on kicking and punching the air where the door leafs used to block her way, even if they were to break. She wouldn't stop until she would go down herself, seriously injured and deadly exhausted. Right there she would collapse, on the threshold, the crossing of which she gave everything for just a moment ago, and before she would ever get to reach the goal that she has hurt herself for, the door that she broke down, before it broke her down, would be replaced by a sturdier one.
This is not the first time that Saskia is in this situation. With just about everything that she has ever wanted to reach, her obsessive nature would prevent her from making it. She would be going and going for something - increasingly fast, harder and harder - but in the course of her attempts she would forget what she even wanted, and just before she would be close enough to grab it, she would be too exhausted to crawl the last step.
It was like this with her exams in college and with her once ago fiancee. Just the same it went with her jobs in management, with friends she had some time ago and with partners who she failed. Over and over and over again her obsession would ruin everything, and right now it is happening, as well.
She is too obsessed to hear a thing and never notices that a car is approaching. The gravel crunches when the tires block, when it stops in the parking lot. Thereafter, there's a groaning that accompanies fast footsteps on the stairs which are leading to the door and in front of it, to her.
All of a sudden someone grabs her from behind, but it takes her some time to even notice, that is how busy she still is with breaking in. When she feels resistance, she starts struggling to get out of the grip that the hairy fingers on a strong, but wrinkled hand have wrapped themselves around her wrists with. She doesn't even think about turning around to see who is holding her back, but then she has no choice. Despite her efforts to tear away, and regardless of the disapproving noises that she makes, the hands won´t let her go, but turn her around, and the veil that is her obsession falls off. She is forced to look at the person behind her, maybe her savior, and when sees him, she freezes. Her mouth drops open once he starts speaking.
"Saskia, stop! What are you doing?"
She doesn't breathe for a moment and only stares at the sweat that is climbing down the wrinkles on his forehead. At the shiny bald head, upon which she can see her own reflection. It takes her a moment to shake the shock off her face, thaw her tense features and give an answer, as if she has forgotten why she is there.
"I… I am looking for Mara. But what… What about you?"
The grip around her wrists loosens. Hesitantly the hairy fingers let her go and she takes a step back from who she is faced with, distrust in her eyes.
"Weird coincidence, isn't it?" She hears his answer. "That is what I am here for, I am looking for Mara. So… If you don´t mind, why the fuck are you?`"