"What makes a person hate themselves?"
"Cowardice, perhaps. Or the eternal fear of being wrong, of or not doing what others expect. A few moments ago I was happy,I forgot I was under sentence of death; then, when I remembered the situation I'm in, I felt frightened."
The nurse opened the door, and Veronika went out.
How could she ask me that? What does she want, to understand why I was crying? Doesn't she realize I'm a perfectly normal person, with the same desires and fears as everyone else, and that a question like that, now that it's all toolate, could throw me into panic?
As she was walking down the corridors, lit by the same faint light as in the ward, Veronika realized that it was too late: She could no longer control her fear.
I must get a grip of myself. I'm the kind of person who sticks to any decision she makes, who always see thing through.
It's true that in her life she had seen many things through to their ultimate consequences, but only unimportant things, like prolonging a quarrel that could easily have been resolved with an apology ,or not phoning a man she was in love with simply because she thought the relationship would lead nowhere. She was intransigent about the easy things, as if trying to prove to herself how strong and indifferent she was, when in fact she was just a fragile woman who had never been an outstanding student, never excelled at school sports, and had never succeeded in keeping the peace at home.
She had overcome her minor defects only to be defeated by matters of fundamental importance. She had managed to appear utterly independent when she was,in fact, desprately in need of company. When she entered a room everyone would turn to look at her, but she almost always ended the night alone,in the convent, watching a TV that she hadn't even bothered to have properly tuned. She gave all her friends the impression that she was a wman to be envied, and she expended most of her energy in trying to behave in accordance with the image she had created of herself.
Because of that she never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending that they didn't cared about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.
She might have impressed a lot of people with her strenght and determiniation, but where had it left her? In the void. Utterly unknown. In Villete. In the anteroom of death.
Veronika's remorse over her attempted suicide resurfaced, and she firmly pushed it away again. Now she was feeling something she had never allowed herself to feel: Hatred.
Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost thouch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriate as she could.
At the moment she hated everything: herself, the world, the chair in front of her, the broken radiator in one of the corridors, people who were perfect, criminals. She was in a mental hospital, and so, she could allow herself to feel thing that people usually hide. We are all brought up only to love, to accept, to look for ways around things, to avoid conflict. Veronika hated everything, but mainly she had hated the way she had lived her life, never bothering to discover the hundreds of other Veronikas wh lived inside her and who were interesting, crazy, curious, brave, bold.
How could I hate someone who only gave me love? thought Veronika, confused, trying to check her feelings. But it was too late; her hatred had been unleashed; she had opened the door to her personal hell. She hated the love she had been given because it had asked for nothing in return, which was absurd, unreal, gainst the lwas of nature.
That love asking for nothing in return had managed to fill her with guilt, with a desire to fulfill another's expectations, even if that meant giving up everything she had dreamed of herself. It was a love that for years had tried to hide from her the difficulties and the corruption that existed in the world, ignoring the fact that one day she sould have to find this out, and would then be defenseless against them.
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Sana pinag tyagaan nyo basahin. Eheh, la lang.. Maganda sya promise!
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