The plaid of his shirt was almost imperceptible, its beige shades imposing their neutrality on subtle vibrancies seeping through relentlessly. The shadows of the room camouflaged still more his nondescript trousers as he sat quietly on the sofa while his physique sat upright as though to detract himself from alternate dispositions. Though his eyes were fixed on the television, she was aware of his awareness of her.

“How long have you been here?”  they exchanged, conscious of avoiding details beyond personal boundaries. But as though an imperative had imposed itself on him, he stated slowly and clearly:

“I have a Master’s degree in English.”

She would have been impressed with him without this perspective. Unsurfaced in her mind was the thought that someone with a Master’s degree in English does not speak of it within minutes of an introduction. Rather, she was taken by his gentle expression, intelligent perception and the accuracy of his communication. His words were a mere consequence of these characteristics, she thought.

 Looking forward to the lounge, she returned to it the next day. As she walked through the door’s threshold her eyes darted the room’s darkness, skimming over the figure seated on the sofa, for she barely recognized him there at first. It was the same face, yet it was not. His eyes were unaware that anyone else stood within his presence. She thought she heard sounds emanating from his mouth. Shock forced her to bore her eyes into his frame – only to see a blankness which confirmed that their encounter had been obliterated from his reality. New meaning diffused into his words of yesterday while she reflexively filed the incident in her mind for a future convenience.

Perhaps it was because this incident occurred within the ivory tower of a mental hospital, or perhaps because they had not yet even exchanged their names – or more accurately – because of the depth of the darkness of this experience, she compartmentalized it in the annals of her mind through the years. 

For it was not until decades later when she found herself gazing at a lake that she discovered the courage to weep for him. In that moment she understood what it is that he had meant by “I have a Master’s degree in English” : how the extremities of one horizon could eliminate the breadth and depth of another, how the scope of an acute awareness adds to the profundity of loss and how one is confronted with abysmal tragedy in a world foreign to both polarities.  

It was not until the tears flowed that she embraced the person containing the opposite poles of human understanding and inhuman destruction as potentialities within herself while  bringing to mind her own experiences of illness, rejection, stigmatization and, turning the tables,  saw her face in those of her perpetrators, thereby admitting a reality that she was at least at one time, one of them. 

She let go, allowing tendrils of forgiveness to grow from within, granting them – in their minuteness – the whisper of freedon to permeate the vastness of both worlds.