The River

Raindrops were painting pictures on the windows of the bus. She was fascinated by how the raindrops did their drawings. Smudged images of grey and light green scenery with people looking like drops of color race by. A stop light. A stop light was significant for her life at the moment. 

The bus stopped, but kept going shortly after. Everything keeps going its own ways in life, she thought. It took about half an hour until she finally reached her destination. She stepped out of the bus, realizing she didn't have an umbrella. There is no protection. It's just like life. 

As she walked down the street with no idea where to go, the backpack on her felt heavier with each footstep she took. Her feet started to get soaked from the puddles she did not avoid. It's just like life. But she kept walking. She kept walking and walking with nowhere to go to and no reason to go anywhere. The only reason to go somewhere was the hope to find a better place. 

She wasn't able to find a place that was better than the last one. So she sat down on a dirty bench near a river to watch the river flowing. It kept flowing and flowing. Pieces of wood passed by like little boats of hope. In her imagination she placed a wish on one of them and sent it down the river. Not all boats arrive. The wind messed up her hair, but she didn't take notice of it. She had goosebumps allover her arms. She took a picture out of her backpack. It was ripped in two pieces. She wanted to send it down on a wooden boat like her imaginations, but she couldn't. The picture was a memory.

You can erase them in your imagination, you just can't erase them for real. She held the picture to her heart. If only I could fix it. She put the picture's pieces back and kept walking along the river. The river was grey but it kept going. It's like my thoughts on life. 

There was a shopping cart upside down in the river. It looked like a cage. It was stuck in this position. The river kept flowing and it went through the shopping cart, but the shopping cart didn't move. Life keeps going, but I can't move. The day slowly turned into night with no visible sunset. There was no sign of anything brightening up. The weather wasn't going to change any time soon and so was her life. She was stuck at a point in life where nothing made sense. 

It was all a matter of communication. She felt left alone with her backpack and nowhere to go. There was no one to talk to. She turned her face upward and looked at the sky. The raindrops began to mix with her tears. She felt like she was going to dry up soon, even though it would not cease to rain in the nearer future. Tears dry up someday, the feeling of emptiness doesn't. She sat down. It didn't matter whether she would get her clothes dirty or not. If the inside is sad, the outer surface will show it sooner or later, too. There she sat with her dirty clothes, the messed up hair and she used the river as her mirror. The teardrops fell in the river in the same monotony like the raindrops. Drop, drop, drop. She wanted the river to wash away her fears and her depression. She wanted her problems to be vanished, but she knew it couldn't get much better. 

The situation used to be the best until she was left alone. It's never going to be the same like it used to be. The backpack was too heavy to handle it. Everything was in fact too difficult to handle for her. She had gotten this backpack once because she was ready to travel and have a good time. Now the backpack was in use for one of the hardest times in her life. She stopped crying. Her face was all sticky. She opened her backpack to find some family pictures, some paper and a pen and her favorite teddy bear. The teddy bear accompanied her every day in her life and never left her alone. She looked at him. It made her smile. She went through the pictures and had to cry again. She knew they all loved her.

But I am not supposed to be loved. She wrote a letter. It was all scribbled down in haste, in a mix of anger, the last tiny bit of hope that was about to die, sadness, depression and the fact that she didn't know what she had done and why she deserved life to treat her like that. She folded the letter and put it into the arms of the teddy bear. She placed the backpack, the letter and the teddy bear under a tree. She put her feet in the water and let her legs sink down, too. Her upper body followed. She covered her face in the water. It was icy cold and she felt a sting on her skin that was like a thousand needles, but the frostiness was the exact balance to the pain burning inside of her.