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The snow fell silently, white flakes wetting Emily’s hair as they landed and melted. It was cold, but she couldn’t feel it. Emily didn’t really feel anything at all. She just stared up at the church that she stood before, contemplating whether or not she should enter. Religion had never been kind to Emily. She had been a pregnant teenager who was ostracized by her community because of that and her subsequent abortion. She wanted to believe that God was more considerate than bigots, but she wasn’t even certain of his existence. After this case, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore. It had brought up too much pain from her haunting past that she’d tried so hard to forget.
It turns out that you can’t drown your demons after all.
“Are you okay?” a voice sounded from beside Emily. She turned to face the source, a woman of strong stature, despite her small size.
Emily pondered her question for a moment before responding. Was she okay?
“Sometimes things happen, she started, "and I don’t think that we ever come back from them." It was the truth. Emily had spent her entire life pushing her feelings aside in favor of helping other people deal with theirs, and, by doing that, she was making her own problems worse for her. She always told people that she compartmentalized better than others, when, really, she was just avoiding her issues altogether. In all honesty, Emily couldn’t recall a single time when she’d taken the time to allow herself to cope with the things that she’d seen and experienced in her life. Even after the Doyle case, Emily just went back to work like nothing happened, like she hadn’t slept with a terrorist in order to gather enough evidence to have him imprisoned for life, like she hadn’t betrayed her morals for the sake of the job that often terrified her. She refused to let herself feel and deal, fearing that she’d break down and never recover.
“So you’re looking for solace somewhere,” the woman said.
“You could say that,” Emily replied bitterly, eyes focusing on the church once more. “If God’s so ever-loving and powerful, then why’s there so much horror in the world? The things that I see everyday - it’s enough to drive anyone mad.”
“I don’t know,” the other woman responded. “You seem to be holding onto your sanity well enough," she half-joked before sighing.
“I think that there are horrible things that we all have to deal with. As shitty as some of us have it, we just have to survive. The pain’s worth it in the end - at least, that’s what I’ve been told,” she continued. “I don’t really know if there’s a point to life or if anything comes from being a good person after it’s over. I think that we have to be advocates for ourselves. We have to push to be happy, because we’re the only ones who can. I don’t know if there’s a God. No one does. I know that things do happen, though, and we can either drown in our sorrows or we can move forward and live our lives."
Emily turned to face the woman, who was now gazing thoughtfully at the church. She was beautiful in a pained way. Her brown eyes held a wisdom that was well beyond her years. Her tanned skin looked almost gaunt in the harsh orange streetlight, and her lips were pursed as if she was reliving her own painful past.
“I’m Emily,” she introduced herself.
“Elle,” the woman said, eyes moving to look at Emily again. “Whatever it is that’s bothering you, you’ll figure it out.”
Emily wasn’t so sure, but her lips morphed into a small smile anyway.
“Thank you,” she replied, because she really was grateful. Elle had provided Emily with more solace than she’d gotten during her entire hour trying to communicate with God. She was honest, unlike how the priest or the congregation probably would have been, had she gone into the church.
There was only so much persistent blind faith Emily could deal with before losing it.
In her heart, she knew that everything would be okay eventually. Time might not be able to heal all wounds, but it would at least make them less agonizing to deal with, and Emily did know that for a fact. She did.