The Choice To Remain Not Free

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

She sat opposite and talked about freedom. Enthusiastic. With hope. With eyes wide open She dreamed of breaking free from the dull, tight corset, life, which had not pleased her for nearly thirty-four years. She spoke and was afraid to admit to herself that this dream did not go anywhere beyond words

At first, she was not pleased with the elementary school, because there was nothing good and kind in it, except for a fabulous landscape with a gingerbread house all over the wall in the assembly hall. Friends were one-day, replacing friendship with ridicule or just treacherous silence when a small society demanded it.

Then she was not pleased with the university, to which she entered with difficulty in a specialty that was supposed to become a light in the window of daily disappointments, but she never did. Almost as mercilessly dull were the trips to work, from which I constantly wanted to howl on long lonely evenings.

She had a fragile, perky mother who loved to laugh heartily, who fell silent as soon as the key turned at the door and a despotic husband with cold eyes appeared on the threshold. He did not allow them anything superfluous, sometimes refusing even the necessary, because he considered it whims.

And then she had a husband, in an alliance with whom she dived with the same anxious expectation with which they dive for the first time to a coral reef. He did not become a breath of fresh air, because instead of fish and corals, under the water of everyday life, there were rusty sunken boats and for some reason garbage.

She still dreamed of breaking out of her suffocating corset, getting all the conventional hairpins out of her hair, breathing in the heady air of freedom and heading towards a world free from the past, present and from herself.

She wanted her, this cherished freedom, but could not stay in it for a long time, getting involved in difficult relationships or depressing work. Sometimes she woke up feeling an incredible rise in strength and readiness for anything. She walked, danced in the transition and made new acquaintances, finally feeling free. But by nightfall, the fuse was on the wane and this freedom became as unbearable as that of Milan Kundera in an almost eponymous work. She ended her evening on a sagging couch watching dull football in the company of her husband, for whom she felt nothing but emptiness.

But she did not know that to be truly free - she is not able to. Because there was no such example before my eyes. Because he does not know how to live outside these inner four walls of confinement. It does not know how so that it seems as if it does not even exist beyond their concrete boundaries. And also because this is the only way she can go without help. And she is not ready to become free, just as she is not ready to hear it. Because being free is a choice she never made. She waited for someone to do it for her, but the miracle did not happen.