Garnet

She is silent, and it is not the kind of silence I am used to from her. It is a weary silence…as if she were too broken and too exhausted to try to express whatever is haunting her.

She wants to give up, but to her, giving up has never been easy. She has held on for the longest time – dreaming big dreams and caring with all her heart and giving everything she had. It is not easy to let go of that now. But she is disillusioned, and she is hurting too much. If only, if only, if only…. But the wounds are already too deep, and she cannot pretend any longer.

I am not used to seeing her like this. Nobody is. She smiled so freely and laughed too easily for me to ever imagine her this way. But I look at her now and realize that maybe, just maybe, I have never really seen her before.

I want to ask her to hold on just a little bit longer. I want to tell her to talk to me, let me take some of the pain. And most of all, I want to urge her to try again, just one more time. But how can I ask that of her? How can I tell her to dream again, when she had given her soul to this one dream, and it had broken her heart so badly? How can I convince her that I believed in her, when she had already stopped believing in herself? The look in her eyes seems too distant for me to reach….

And yet I must try. She may not know it, but I feel that if she surrenders now, it will change her forever. If she stops dreaming, she may never allow herself dreams as big and beautiful as this one again. If she gives up, it will be a betrayal of the very essence that makes her who she is. Letting go will hurt her as much as holding on.

She needs to believe again. Just one more time, just one more try. Just one more dream. Maybe this time, she’ll find herself not being alone.