Relationships Lead Us to Important Moments of Self-Discovery

Relationships lead us to important moments of self-discovery.

The pale white curtains gently moved in the cool autumn winds. I lay there holding my wife, Ellie, in my arms but as I opened my eyes I was alone. A single tear slid down my cheek as I remembered how I had come home in 1944 after being in the hospital, due to shrapnel being buried deep within my right knee from a grenade, and finding out that my beautiful Ellie had hung herself after having read a false letter which had stated that I had not survived my injury. That month was the worst of my life as I not only lost the ability to bend my right knee, my best friend died by diving on the grenade to save me and then to come home filled with such hope of seeing Ellie to only have my heart broken into millions of pieces as the love of my life had passed on from this world. The clock ticked over to 8 as I began to get out of my web of bed sheets, I placed 2 yellow pills into my mouth, it was these that allowed me to walk with little pain. I sat on the edge of my bed as my mind remembered a conversation I had with my sister in law after Ellie’s funeral. She told me that ‘I needed to discover more about myself and enjoy living’, I only replied with ‘Ellie used to help me unearth features about myself even I did not know I had, how can I go on without my other half’. My trusty old wooden cane found its place within my grasp as I struggled out of bed and down the marble stairs. The big house felt empty as for a second the house was full of colour, Ellie was standing before me in an elegant red dress inviting guests in for the ball. Just as she looked at me it all disappeared and I was sent crashing back to my solitary confinement. The sharp chill of mountain air met my lungs as I took the first step outside. My cane bumped into a crate of food and milk, attached was a note, which stated, “Enjoy your daily walk - this is all the food I could scrounge up”. I smiled at the thought of Billy’s kindness, he was the only person in the town, in the valley below, who was friendly to me. All the others alienated me because of my limp, my wife’s death and because I was a veteran. But that was not the only note that I woke to, another was an eviction notice and how the house would be knocked down at 0900 sharp.

The rocky path, which wound up the mountainside, looked dark and menacing but to me it only provided a chance to connect with Ellie. She loved the outdoors, always dragging me out to go on this mountain walk and admire the amazing landscape. Ellie always saw this rugged landscape as beautiful, but to me it just looked like a bunch of rocks placed together by some enormous unknown force. But this time it was different, this time I saw the drops of rain glistening in the morning sun as they desperately clung to the branches of the pine trees. As I walked higher up the mountain, the mist invited me to go further. Then I saw her, Ellie, standing in the mist in a graceful white dress reaching out to me with a smile fixed upon her face, those amazing blue eyes filled with love as her blonde hair gently swayed in the wind. I felt something then, which I hadn’t felt in years, hope that I can live again. But the bright fingers of the dawning sun reached out and began to disintegrate the mist, and with the mist went my love. I walked right past the spot where I saw her and I felt a gentle touch on my arm, just like Ellie used to, and then it was gone, so fast it made me wonder if I had actually felt anything.