In her world there is no real peace, only the struggle for awareness, her refusal to fall back into nothingness, into the total darkness which is worse than dying. Obstinate Melissa resists the obliteration of her soul.

She does not mean harm to any of them. Not to the girl Jane. Ah! How Jane reminds her of herself, the young Melissa, no longer the child, but a full woman. Not to Julian, whose boyhood she’d sought to protect, against himself, against the jealous others, and, maybe, though she would not have admitted it at the time, against herself, her smothering love.

Nor does she wish any harm to the woman Sarah, who owns Julian, who dominates his life; she’s the guardian of his body, and of his soul. But Melissa knows. Sarah is the enemy, perhaps a reincarnation of the girl she once saw, walking next to Julian. Once, and how painful that memory is, even now… How sharp was the pain of jealousy when she saw them. She said nothing, but she still wears the deep open wound in her heart. 

What she hopes is to see him, to see his face, to tell him perhaps, in her own words, that she has forgiven, that, if for her, time stopped then, as he stepped out of her life, she understands that his life is his. Could he make a little place for her, for the wraith that used to be Melissa? She does not need much space: she lives in between, in the unreality of her memories – and his.

She does not know how to achieve this. Finding him took so much pain, a journey she could not describe; it can only be evoked in fragments, in pictures she somehow rescued from the wreckage, and in the things she finds on those waves that Julian appears keen to surf… 

Chi… This is what she has to do. She must try again to attract him there, perhaps early morning, before its beaches are invaded by the young people who love its sand, their beautiful bodies, and the waves. The girl Jane will help her…

Picture: Michal Lukasiewicz

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