As far as Eslae was concerned, the past five years were better left forgotten.
She could still see his face in her mind without much effort and that was enough of a sign that it hadn’t been long enough. She thought about how it had all began and she shook her head. What a fool she had been, so young and naive. It was young love, that’s what they called it, right? He had been an ice earthling named Zave, only a couple of years older than her, and he was her everything. They had met at a lecture at the Academy. She was there with her father, and he had been traveling, wanting to see more of the world. And he seemed to be everything she had wanted. He was handsome, funny, and above all intelligent. She felt that she could lose herself in the conversations with him, they had so much in common, and their minds connected on a level she never thought was possible.
But that was only the beginning, and she had learned the hard way that good things don’t last forever. She had heard the rumors around town, but she refused to believe them. Zave had promised himself to her after only a few months of being together and she returned the feelings. To her that meant that there was no way that he was seeing other women behind her back, it was something she couldn’t imagine from someone like Zave. This was her first mistake. She would note later that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was.
It was only later, when he had convinced her that they should run away together, start a life and a family, that the rumors came to not only be true, but the behavior she saw in Zave had gotten worse. She chalked it up to being young and stupid, but she truly lost herself in him. He chipped away at her for two more years, shaping her into believing that she had nowhere to go, that the best she could do was him. That leaving him and returning home would be failure, and it would be her fault. Somewhere along the lines she had lost more and more friends, her conversations hovering delicately away from why she was wearing long sleeves in such warm weather, or why she didn’t pull her hair back while she worked anymore. If she had to answer those questions, she would have to admit that things were not okay.
The worst blow was that he had somehow convinced her that she was stupid, that she didn’t know what she was talking about, and that the conversations between the two of them weren’t deep enough. If he posed something philosophical and she had no answer, he would berate her, raising his voice and his temper, and she would instinctively flinch away, knowing if the situation didn’t diffuse she had his anger in store for her.
Somewhere along the way she didn’t even realize that there was a breaking point and that she had passed it. Her apathy to her life snuck up on her, and it was only looking back that she had realized that it was even there. This was when she had realized it was too much for her. And still she didn’t leave him. She didn’t want to be the one to call it quits, to consider it a failure that she couldn’t make a relationship work. It was one more fight of theirs that finally ended the life that she had come to know. He yelled at her to leave the house, his expletives streaming from his mouth in the process and she felt the switch shut off. If he wanted her gone, she would give it to him.
She left everything she had with him. In that one moment she left and never turned back. She didn’t return to her parents, that life was over now. She was a grown woman and with time she would start trying to piece herself together. Start trying to get back the price she had paid for three years of her life.
Since then she had healed physically, but the mental damage would take much more time. She still didn’t feel ‘right’, didn’t feel like herself. But maybe she never would. She had an apartment in the capital now, somewhere closer to the Academy than she had been before. She surrounded herself with books and journals. She would learn what she didn’t know, better her mind. But the scars that healed over her were still entirely too sore, and because of that she tried her best to not think about Zave, her fear that she’ll slip right back into the hole she had started to dig herself out of on her own.
(Word Count: 804)
