After that incident we didn’t see each other for a long time. Lizzie stayed in another building and received special treatment. We mostly languished alone in our room. And when we finally met again she didn’t even mention the last drawing of her series and we were so eager to keep it that we didn’t say a word, either. We could never understand why she cried that day.
One day when we were having dinner in the dining room, Lizzie came up to us and said, “You know what? I envy you! You will never be lonely, which sooner or later happens to everyone, but not to you.” I asked her why people are lonely and she answered, “People are selfish. Most of them only pretend to love someone while in fact the only people they love are themselves. Instead of confessing their love, they ask: do you love me? And all those lofty feelings they proclaim they believe in are a mere romantic flight of the imagination; in truth, they simply want someone always beside them. By all means they try to gain sole ownership of someone but are not capable of committing themselves in return; then comes everyday routine followed by boredom; the illusory love dies, giving place to alienation that foredooms people to even greater loneliness. Love not only means unification and preservation, but it is also the process of creation, too; people know about this, but somehow never remember.” In retrospect, our time with Lizzie really taught us a lot, more than all the time without her. Our worthless life meant something when we were with her and she was talking to us.
However, other dwellers of the boarding school saw us the way we actually were and the way we saw ourselves for the first time many years ago. Before we hadn’t had the chance to face large mirrors; doctors at the institute of traumatology used only small, portable ones. I can clearly remember the day when Ivan Borisovich put a cabinet-sized mirror in his office and stood by it. It had lighting on its edges. They brought us in front of it and left us alone. We had seen ourselves before, in reflections in windows and on glass doors attached to medical cabinets, but that time was the most painful. All the doctors standing in the hall were looking at us very attentively. Dispassionately, Ivan Borisovich wrote something with enthusiasm. You started smiling and gesticulating intensely but all I wanted to do was to run away that very minute; suddenly I realized why everybody stared at us. I literally lost my firm ground, my head started spinning; having lost my balance for a second, I tumbled down on to the floor and dragged you with me. I remember that I hurt myself badly and tears started streaming down my face. The floor was terribly cold and you attempted to get up at once, but I just wanted to lie down and cry. I couldn’t protest and shout because I had no strength left; instead I lay there and refused to get back to my feet. “An interesting case,” Ivan Borisovich remarked; “I would call this behavior motor adynamia.” From then on, this term has been used to explain every disagreement between you and me. Finally, someone helped us to get up and brought us back to our room. But now I knew for sure: my true mirror was you. You have always understood and accepted my most genuine, most intimate impulses and responded to them with surprising accuracy. I wish all people turned into such mirrors for each other.
It is hard to tell at what age I started to have dreams in which I was alone. Of course, it was like I knew that you were always around, but, nevertheless, we were each by herself, separated from each other. In my dreams, my own world expressed itself fully and became visible, absolutely visible. I was confidently running along the corridor, flying and falling, or finding myself in a mysterious castle full of obscurities and secrets. The sense of freedom I had gained was filling me with lightness and comfort even when I could not feel my feet anymore; at that moment I usually stumbled and fell into emptiness. After waking up I found you peacefully sleeping to the right of me, as always, the way I see you now.
I cannot remember all the details of that rainy August morning. We were sitting in our room and I was reading aloud the story of a tiny, little boy with golden hair (Novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince) who was looking for a lamb. Once upon a time a pilot arrived in a white plane and did him a drawing of a lamb in a box, a muzzle for the lamb so that it couldn’t eat the boy’s flower, and even a leash to keep it from running away. But one day a snake bit the child and he died. His death was supposed to send him back to where he came from; as people go back to the earth, the kid with golden hair went back to the stars.
You and I were speculating on the fairy tale we had just read and suddenly heard an unusual fuss in the corridors of the boarding house, people’s hubbub and hasty shuffling sounds. We put the book aside and left the room following the sounds like rats charmed by a magic flute. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find out what had happened. One of the doctors yelled at us and ordered us back into our room, so we dragged back. Soon, from our window we saw an ambulance and people in white robes carrying a litter; something was definitely going on. Later we peeped into the dining room to ask the cooks about the incident, but they kept their silence as if their lives depended on it, so we had nothing to do but to return to our room again. We were not in the mood to continue discussing the book and were just looking out of the window without a word. Little by little, a strange, unpleasant premonition seized us. I felt that something irreparable had happened and things would never be the same from that moment on. And it was true. That rainy morning our poor Lizzie had jumped out of the window.
Lizzie was overly vulnerable, excessively fragile and way too special to have a good chance of living long. She had the same golden bush of hair as that kid from the book, and her flight from a window turned out to be her bright retrieval of the stars. Obviously, we are those ugly ducklings everyone leaves. We cried all night long, and in the morning you told me, “Faith, promise me you will never cry again with Hope.” I think you matured dramatically that night and became the one I could rely on.
One day Lizzie saw us going down the stairs. We try to perform this operation, simple for ordinary people, slowly and in unison. Coordinating our movements and supporting each other, we take turns, lowering our legs cautiously, first the left pair of legs, then the right. At the sight of this scene Lizzie’s dreamily wide-open, permanently astonished, blue eyes became even larger.
“Gosh and hell!” she exclaimed. “It never fails to amaze me how often life generously grants people opportunities and talents, which they neglect for the sake of comfortable, sated and completely mediocre lives which they don’t appreciate in the slightest. Some of them are given everything other people would dream of; so probably they should do nothing else but take advantage of their talents and exercise them, but they don’t. Their lives are limited by comfort, idle laziness and full stomachs. You are totally different. You are having a hard time doing even the simplest of things. If you could gain the abilities of ordinary people — who knows, perhaps, you would even learn to fly. People must be grateful for your existence! I am.”
After the incident, the parents of the deceased girl made a terrible fuss in the boarding school. The higher authorities became seriously disturbed that the school accommodates people with various forms of diseases which result in additional threats to the health of vulnerable groups, some of them ending up in mortuaries. Because doctors determined that Lizzie had dropped out of a window accidentally when she slipped on a wet ledge, a few of the doctors were dismissed and most of the patients were sent to other boarding schools. As for us, we were supposed to be transferred to a foster home for children with movement disorders.