7 The psychologist

Sick. Maybe morbid. Is it too harsh to describe her like that? Now that she is dead she can react to it no more. She can no longer defend herself and neither can she prove me wrong.

I am smoking. My fifth cigarette, under a narrow canopy in the churchyard, because it’s raining – at the end of the roof and in my head. It’s raining and raining while I am smoking and smoking, although I never wanted to start again after I was pregnant. Why did I do it anyway? Why would you sometimes do things that mean only harm to you? If she were still alive, I would ask Lina, although I’m sure for what she did she had different reasons than I do for the cigarettes I smoke.

Would it be too easy to call her my reason? Probably, because the psyche is more complicated than that – mine maybe not as much as hers. She was just sitting across from me. Every week, with her foot tapping incessantly, with her speeding speech, her excited eyes and a look that would disguise everything that she was feeling. That’s why I never made it far enough to see who she really was.

Sick. Maybe morbid. Underneath a dense cloud of smoke that keeps gaining weight in the wet winter air, I can hardly think of any other words to describe her and maybe that’s normal, because you cannot see the real person at all, enveloped by compulsive behaviors, like a fish that’s caught up in a net. For herself, she wasn’t that. For herself, she was a lioness: irrepressible, wild, maybe dangerous at times, and she may have always known that a hunter would break her bones.

What am I even doing here? Let her go, let it finally be! I want to pinch myself to shake her off, but ever since she’s dead she is not leaving anymore and all I can do is stand here, smoking, and listen to the words she once spoke.

“The electric fences around the lion cages in the zoo… Why put them up, I wonder? And at whose request? It’s hardly the lions that call for it.”

How do you help someone who says sentences like that? I could have helped her, if there hadn’t been fences to prevent it. She said they aren’t there to keep the lions protected, but to protect others from them. I’ve always been wondering who put them there. What are they made of and since when have they been crackling in the air? Has there ever been an incident? A situation that made them necessary, or have they always just been inherent because the lioness was a lioness?

Sobbing. Here you can hear it from every corner. From the high ceilings of the church it keeps echoing. They have to have liked her, otherwise it would be quiet now, and whoever liked her liked her more than she did herself. Without the fences, she would only harm someone else, she thought, and laughed at it as if she didn’t mean it, although this is exactly how she has always seen it.