Theresa had just come out of the asylum. She
wasn’t supposed to call it that but she found it was better to call things by
their name. She had been there for five months, after suffering a very serious
mental breakdown in her office. Thing had been thrown, insults had been hurled
and the police had to be called to stop her from hurting more people. Things
had really gone badly that day and she had to accept, in front of a judge, the
condition of getting help in the insane asylum.
Her stay there had been largely uneventful,
except for the screams she had to hear every single night, that prevented her
from sleeping like a normal person. Besides that, she had to go to the shrink
every single day, for an hour, and also to group therapy once a week. It was a
lot of talking, of listening and of showing others how she felt and looking at
people hurting from their pasts or presents. It was kind of tiring at the
beginning, but it eventually became part of the routine.
Same happened with the meds. Her doctor had assigned
a certain prescription to her at first, but then it was change several times
during her stay in the asylum. The things she had to take, with a little sip of
water, kept getting stronger. She had begun losing grip of reality. After
having a crisis in her cell, she decided to leave the meds and just pretend she
was taking them. It wasn’t easy because they checked everyone afterwards, but
she was able to make one of her new friends take them.
The first week she spent outside of the
asylum, she realized how mean that had been. Making someone unstable taker her
meds could have been potentially destructive for said person and maybe even for
herself. However, she knew that those chemicals would have never helped her at
all. She just needed to get away from everything, she needed silence and calm,
as well as some time away from everything that bothered her, starting with her
job and her family. In short, she needed some sort of holiday.
That’s why she liked to tell people that her
stay in the asylum had been uneventful, just something he had to do in order to
please the society that had deemed her unfit to be in society. She tried to
fake her hatred of the system and decided to get a job that wouldn’t be as
stressful as the one she had before. Over two months after her release, Theresa
was able to get employed in a flower shop, taking care of the plants and also
attending costumers when the owner wasn’t around. It was a very calm
environment, perfect for her. Free of stress and fear.
However, her family was still around maybe
even more than before. Theresa had tried hard to make them understand she
needed time for herself, in order to get well again. But they didn’t care about
that at all. They were too busy thinking about how others would perceive them.
Her mother had many friends all over the city and she had even received some
gossip about her own daughter that Theresa just refused to discuss. She had no
need or urge to comment on any of it with her mother.
Her father had been dead for a couple of years
and her mother and siblings would always say, when she was around, that it was
better that way in order for her not to shame the family name and her father’s
prestige in front of the rest of the community. They behaved as if they were
kings and queens or something very similar. It was a relief when Donna, the
owner of the flower shop, asked her to go for a short period of time to the
small town from where she received the flower shipments.
Apparently, they had been having problems with
some of the plants and they needed to get them in line because Valentine’s Day
was coming soon and that was their big day of the year for sales. Theresa had
shown so much interest in the business and in the plants as themselves, that
Donna thought it would be perfect to send her to represent the company. She
would have to visit several plantations and tell them exactly what they were
looking for, in order to improve sales and wealth for everyone involved.
She accepted the moment Donna proposed her
plan to her. She left a week later, without telling her family or anyone else.
She just grabbed a suitcase and hopped on the bus. She arrived there and
discovered how beautiful real nature was, how calm really looked and how people
lived without so much tension from urban life. She hadn’t realized how her
rough lifestyle had been an important factor in the development of her
emotional crisis. City life almost killed her.
When she arrived, Theresa was supposed to stay
up to three weeks in the town, travelling to other parts of the region every
day. However, she ended up staying more than two months. She only came back to
help Donna with all the craziness of Valentine’s Day. Once the season ended,
she went back to the countryside. No one ever knew what she did there but the
truth was that she had been hired to do the same thing she did in the flower
shop. The only difference was that she did it in the open; with real sunlight
caressing her skin and that was priceless.
Her family looked for her through email,
mobile and telephone, but they never got to her because she had taken a step
back from most of the things the modern world could offer. She visited an
Internet café once a week to read some news and chat with Donna and other
friends, but that was mostly it for her technological life. Most days were
spent in the fields, sweating from early morning to sundown. It was hard work
but she loved feeling so tired that no thoughts ran through her mind.
She would be the first person to wake up, feed
the chickens and pigs and then help in the field, doing whatever they asked her
to do. She loved tending to roses, sunflowers and dahlias, but she would also
work on a potato plantation and picking strawberries and grapes. It was always
changing but it was good money for only one person. She eventually got to save
enough to have her own little house, from were she could travel by foot to any
of her jobs, no matter what she had to do.
Before her breakdown she had been one of those
women that never touched anything without a real necessity. She had a chauffeur
to pick her up from her meetings and then take her back home or to the office.
She had a maid to cook for her and two assistants that helped her much more
than she would admit to. She would be very cold to all of them. Cold wouldn’t
be the word as she was never outright mean, she just wasn’t one of those people
that liked to hang out with others.
Looking back at her past, she thought that
woman in her memories was someone she couldn’t really recognize. That woman,
through some sort of creep psychological magic, had been locked away in the
asylum, with all the other crazy people. She was a danger to herself and others
and it had been quite a difficult task to get rid of her. Because, before
anything else, Theresa had to realize how bad everything was before taking the
road to a better life, which is exactly what she did.
Eventually, she met someone she was able to
fall in love with. He was the first person there, in the countryside, to know
who she had been and how much she had changed. He praised her for that and
acknowledged her might every day of their life together.
As for her mother and siblings, they kept
trying to reach her but she never went back to the city. She just wrote them a
letter telling them how her life was now much better than before and she had no
need to go back to a place so toxic for her.
