I
still don’t know why I did it.
The
Candor say that the truth is too powerful to remain caged. That it is a wild
animal that eats at you from the inside.
Maybe
that’s why I showed Tris. Or maybe it’s because I knew she would not think less
of me after she knew.
She
was small, but she scared me. I didn’t know her limits, and I’ll never know
what I can expect from her. I was not afraid she’d hurt me, I was not afraid of
her. I was afraid that I did not know
her.
In
the claustrophobic box that is a tiny closet upstairs where I spent a quarter of
my childhood, I hear her heart racing. I think she’s afraid too, but not of the
box.
“If
I were in your fear landscape,” I ask her, “would I be in it?”
“I’m
not afraid of you,” she says.
“Of
course you’re not. But that’s not what I mean.”
She
pulls out everything that I thought I would have to hide inside me forever.
“I
have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren’t all that different,” I tell
her. “All your life you’ve been training to forget yourself, so when you’re in
danger, it becomes your first instinct. I could belong in Abnegation just as
easily.”
“Yeah,
well,” she says, “I left Abnegation because I wasn’t selfless enough, no matter
how hard I tried to be.”
“That’s
not entirely true. That girl who let someone throw knives at her to spare a
friend, who hit my dad with a belt to protect me—that selfless girl, that’s not
you?”
Tris is selfless, she’s brave, she’s smart, and she has faith in me. Faith is something I’ve never been given. Mostly expectations.
When I told her I liked her,
I wanted her to know that I was sure about it.
And when I kissed her, I wanted her to know that
I was sure about that, too.
It’s
nice to hear my name again.
No comments:
Post a Comment