Starmere lake to Emmawynn symbolized a new beginning. She had once emerged from the little cave there tentatively ready to start fresh, a broken girl in a strange land. She had so much hope, so many expectations. She was free and while still broken she was excited about all of the possibilities.
Sitting quietly in the dark cave, Emma reflects on what she has learned since then. How naive she had been, how unrealistic her expectations were. How quickly those hopes and expectations were dashed. She had wanted so many different things and she quickly discovered that often even her own desires were incompatible. Freedom did not mean she could have or do anything she wanted. It meant a series of choices, and with each choice she was not only choosing something she was also choosing to let go of something else. She also learned that often the things she most wanted to change were the things outside of her control. Oh how many mistakes she made fighting against things that she could not change.
The people she had met that day changed her path. They fed her, looked after her, supported her and were kind to her. The circle grew and Emma found herself surrounded by people who cared for her and for each other. They were all strong in their own ways. They had all been broken in their own ways. Many of them had seen her at her absolute worst, yet they still accepted her and cared for her. Her heart sang with fullness and gratitude.
Reluctance nagged at her. Her own reluctance. After all they had given her, why was she still reluctant to open up to them? Why did she still hide behind others, behind manners? She wanted to say it was fear, but it wasn’t. She had promised to take responsibility for herself, to stop hiding, and over the last few days she had forced herself to be open with the others, telling them her thoughts and feelings, but forcing it would not be sustainable. She sits quietly as the conversations of the past few days play through her mind and settle.
Dandy’s words, “you aren’t just listening you’re taking on their emotions.” Later in the conversation, “they are allowed to feel however they do, and it is nothing to do with you.” Then Winnie’s words, “no one is truly selfless”. There had been so much more in both of those conversations, but as Emma sits with those words the contradictions to what she had learned growing up, a wave of homesickness washes over her.
Suddenly, she really wants to talk to her grandmother. The woman who had been her rock and her strength, had taught her to handle sadness and sorrow. The woman who had taught her how to “carry the grief and hurts” of others to help lighten their load. She had only been a child then. Had she misapplied her grandmother’s wisdom? Why was it that when she reached out to people it so often went badly? Was it really impossible to be selfless, even though selfless is what her mother said she should be? So many things that she wants to ask her grandmother, but she cannot. Instead, she sits with them pondering the thoughts and sorts out her own answers.
When the answers come she draws up her knees hugging them tightly and resting her forehead on them while a torrent of tears flows. For once she does not try to stop them, she lets them fall until they are spent. Somewhere along the way she had lost her hope, maybe a little piece at a time, or maybe when she was faced with one more thing she could not change, maybe it was when there was a difficult choice to be made, or perhaps it had been when she had truly looked at herself and seen just how selfish and shallow she truly was. She had fallen back on helping others to prove to herself that there was some hope, that she still had some goodness, that she had something worthwhile to offer.
As she pulls back the layers the tears slowly dry up, and she finally starts to see clearly what Ryheric had tried to tell her for weeks in his own way. That she could try as hard as she wanted to try, that she could make slow progress by forcing herself to open up to others a little bit at a time, but that real change would not come until she let go of her expectations, quit hiding, and made the choice to just be whoever she was.
Emma slowly pushes herself to her feet and emerges from the cave. Sitting on a stone ledge she looks out over the lake. In a different way, she feels broken, almost as broken as the first time she emerged from the cave, but she is used to feeling broken now. She is used to picking up the pieces and putting them back together. This time it is different, there is hope again. She knows she will never be the good, kind, considerate, selfless person she wants to be, but maybe she can acquire some of those qualities or maybe she will find other qualities along the way.
This time she cannot pick up the pieces and quickly shove them back together. She has to leave the mask broken. She has to start making the hard choices. She smiles a little to herself as she thinks of Cwenawynn and Dandy. They both believed so strongly in fate, one believing she had found hers, the other still looking for hers. While Emma had never considered herself important enough to have a fate she almost laughs as the thought crosses her mind that maybe being broken was her fate. Whether or not fate was actually involved, Emma acknowledges to herself that in spite of hurting, the brokenness feels right and the fresh hope burning in her heart feels almost like a balm to her broken spirit.
