hers, “It’s like your eyes…”
Lika closed her eyes and felt the same lightness and desire for flight as she had in her dream at night. His breathing so close to her face reminded her of the touch of the white butterflies’ wings.
Lika was about to pull the bathroom door when she heard Emilie’s voice coming from there. The talk was about Rita. What Lika heard plunged her into shock. She stood there rooted to the spot; something cracked deep inside her. It was about her hopes and dreams that were collapsing. A minute ago she was the happiest girl in the world; her dream being so close to coming true befuddled her. Happiness had been so close that she had almost caught hold of it, and now it was spilling out just like sand through her fingers. Poor thing, she wanted to go down the drain, to vanish, to stop being not to hear what she had got to hear but could not make herself get under way. She could not even make herself release the door knob clasping it so hard as if she wanted to force all her pain inside it. Tears went pouring from her eyes, and somehow it made it difficult to breathe.
“Does Lika know?” brought her to life. “Do you think we should tell her?” made her let the knob out and withdraw. She did not even remember to pick her bag from Vlad’s room. She ran away without saying goodbye to anyone.
In the yard she breathed in evening chill, and it turned her to breathing normally. What she could not do at the moment was to come back home with her eyes being red from crying. She had to be back with a happy expression on her face at any price otherwise she would never dodge Aunt’s persistent questions; and her aunt was quite skillful at getting answers to her questions.
Lika looked up at her own window. It was dark whilst the neighboring window had a clear cat’s silhouette pictured in the bottom of its illuminated frame. “Coco?” she asked herself recollecting the talking cat at once. “I might’ve died… Everything that happened today wasn’t real, it can’t have been real! I must have died,” she ingeminated looking at the window.
“You can say so,” it overblew inside her head.
“Coco?” she asked.
“Oh, you get used to recognizing me. Well done.”
“So I’m really dead?” Lika inquired and the placidity spilling all over her body surprised her.
“Every single day is a short life, and every single night when you fall asleep, you die. Today you differ from yesterday you, and it won’t be today you who’ll see the light of dawn tomorrow. It’ll be another person, another you, a new you. Surely, you’ll have the same face and the same body, but your look will never be the same again, your smile will change, your gestures will transform because today you’ve got some new experience, you’ve filled your heart with some new content, and at night you’ll die to meet a new you in the morning.”
“And pain? Will it go with the night?”
“Is pain that bad?”
“I don’t know… It’s sometimes unbearable,” Lika said and remembered once again how it felt when the world she lived in collapsed. The pain’s clingy grip on her was still tight. “Tomorrow, when I wake up, will it still hurt?”
“Only if you want it. It can be different. Lots of people want pain. They can’t live without it.”
“People don’t want pain,” Lika uttered wearily and shrugged.
“Why do they let it germinate then?”
“Probably, they don’t know how to live without it?”
“Well-well-well, let’s see… I’ll take the lid off and explain how to live without pain, and we’ll see whether it will work for you.”
“I think I’ll be able to live without pain,” Lika started warming up.
“Then stop antagonizing life. Take it as it is with all its perfection and malformation, sublimity and ignobility, genius and lack of talent, excessive loyalty and betrayal. Life… life is not what we think of it. It’s much bigger, wider, and deeper. You just need to overcome the borders that cut you off the life infinity.”
“What borders?”
“The borders that divide the world into black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, joy and pain…”
“Don’t we have to know what’s good and what’s bad?” Lika did not allow Coco to finish.
“You already know the difference, you can’t deny it, but you can learn how to perceive both of them just as an experience. Stop coloring your life in black and white. Let it be golden or violet, moreover, you’d better let it shine with all existing colors.”
“Is this the secret?”
“Yes. You just stop weighing everything and everyone on your scales.”
“It’s something abstract. I thought you’d give me some precise instructions…” Lika sighed.
“Want instructions? Then try to enjoy the pain that is inside you now.”
“What nonsense! How can you enjoy pain? Do you think I am completely mad?” Lika rebelled; she tried to see the cat’s eyes in the lighted square of the window.
“Right you are, it’s almost impossible to enjoy pain. Do you know why?”
“Pain is displeasing… unbearable… you want to get rid of it,” Lika bitterly pronounced the words, and chills covered her. “Pain kills… it penetrates inside and gets stuck… it… It bites your soul, gnaws it and overcasts it with rooting wounds that keep on nagging. And then the pain will always be a part of you. It’ll never leave you, and you’ll never get used to it. You may forget about it for a while, you may look aside, but it’ll summon you and then it’ll devour you turning you into a wreck and then you’ll die. The pain will kill you…” with her head and shoulders down, she seized talking and felt depressed because of all the words she had said.
“Great. Pathetic. And it’s somehow true within the limits of your own world. Nothing more than stereotypes.”
“And what is out there beyond the limits?” Lika asked automatically though she was not really interested. At the moment she was captured by her own pain. She was fighting it and pressing it out of her soul.
“What do you do when the traffic lights turn red?”
“Why?…” Lika asked but no answer made her give hers. “I stop, of course.”
“And you don’t want to kick the traffic lights off the road, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” she answered quietly having realized at once the point of the question. “Do you mean it’s the pain conception that makes it feel wrong?”
“Not conception, but non-perception,” Coco corrected Lika and fell silent as if giving the girl an opportunity to think over everything they had discussed. In a minute the cat went on. “Enjoy the pain… the same way you enjoy good feelings. Common, feel its depth… make it stronger… concentrate on it, but don’t try to fight it… try to hear its calls, accept it and enjoy it. Common! You can do it!”
Lika stood still gazing inside her heart. She followed the cat’s instructions just because she wanted to prove Coco that its advice was useless.
“I can’t!” she shouted out with astonishment.
“You can’t?”
“I can’t enjoy the pain,” Lika stated with embarrassment, “There’s no pain…. It’s gone…”
“No, it hasn’t. Traffic lights can’t move. You’ve accepted the pain and the red lights have turned green.”
“That’s incredible!” Lika was amazed, “Is it that easy?”
“Genius lies in simplicity as they say. Another thing is difficult, deary…”
“Which