Blackseraphine

 I still couldn't talk the next day.  Still couldn't look at him. Honestly? I wanted to avoid him.

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to think. I wasn't sure yet what I was feeling. Because I felt empty.

Was I upset? Angry? Disappointed?

I wondered if I was wrong in telling him the things I did: that we'd be beside him and support him. I meant every word I said.

But seeing what he did, I wondered if my words made him do that. I wondered if my words made him reckless, thinking it didn't matter what he did because we'd still love him anyway. I wondered if all that I said, all that I did, meant nothing to him. 

I think he would have hated it, hearing those words that he had no self-respect, no dignity. And those were the kind of words that could stick to someone, like a label, like a convenient insult. I hated it. It hurt.

So seeing him drop to the floor again... For no good reason!? Disheartening. 

He didn't even wait for the next meet. He didn't even wait a day! All those things we did... felt disregarded. 

I wasn't asking to be thanked. I wasn't even asking for acknowledgement for what we did, for what I did. But I also didn't want my efforts thrown back at my face. Because that's what it felt.

Anybody who could have seen what he did could have said that he was proving them right. How could I defend that a second time?

It's like telling someone there's an open manhole in the road and they walk right into it.

I slammed the pen I was holding when I meant to put it down. I was getting angry. Or had I been angry since Monday?

I groped for words to describe what I felt, to give meaning to what I didn't feel. I groped for words to understand my own confusion.

By midnight, I finally shed a tear.

I remembered the story within the story of Cinema Paradiso.

In all the years of my life, from my childhood until this Tuesday..

I think I may have finally understood why the soldier left the princess' window in the 99th day.

It was said that he would have died. At least in the ninety-nine days he would have lived with the illusion that she was to be his, waiting for him.

One presumes that he'd thought he won't be worthy of her.

But maybe... it was because he looked at the princess looking at him...

The princess who watched him there outside her window, 

In the rain, in the heat, in the pain of his body betraying him, and the princess watched him...

The princess watched him humiliate himself every day.

And maybe that's why he left on the 99th day. 

He remembered he was human too.