her sunny laughter failed to accurately portray her illness. I would be filled with hope, that
maybe she was getting better.
Moments such as these were the eye of the tornado. Literally, the instant Delilah’s ‘sudden
good mood swings’ (which were what I called them) was over, her symptoms would get worse.
Depression, craziness and anger management issues would fuse together. She couldn’t handle all the
emotions and she would explode, looking for other means to vent them out. It seems like only yesterday that I walked into her room in the clinic and saw her jumping off her bed, as if that would take
her from this world and relieve her of the pain. My heart broke when I witnessed this, the action itself
was not as sad as the partly confused, partly pained look in her eyes. “Why can’t I die like this, Cy?
I want to leave to a different life,” she would whisper, before jumping off her bed repeatedly. It took
two nurses and myself to tie her down and calm her.
Perhaps it was these moments that made me love her more. The need to protect this fragile
human being who could not control herself was overwhelming. I promised her, I whispered into her
ear, that I would never leave her, and that I was always here for her, that I didn’t care what others
thought of us.
I can say with confidence that what we had, though short, was beautiful. It was the type of
love that appears in those fairytales, where one can accept the flaws of each other. Loving a person
despite the flaws that he or she might carry: this was true love, and I thought that this was the love
that we could sustain.
And I shouldn’t have thought so. I shouldn’t have made promises that I wouldn’t be able to
keep. It’s my fault she’s dead. I killed her.
Allow me to pause the story and make an excuse to fend for myself. Loving Delilah was not
an easy task. She was, with no other way to put it, a mystery. There were times when she would be
normal, times when she would fall into depression, times when she would be crazy, and times when
she wouldn’t talk at all. Every time she changed, I had to rapidly fix my attitude as well. Loving her
was difficult, but I tried. I know I tried and those near me knew it also.
But as time went on, loving her changed me. Hanging on to that one indefinite word, I gradually began to lose a sense of who I was. The colors that defined me were mixed together into a shade
of unseemly brownish black. Love became less of a happy sentiment and more of a painful one.
13
There was a month when Delilah stayed stable the entire time: she did not think crazily nor
did she try to die. It had even become possible, during this month, for me to leave work and have
meetings with coworkers before briefly stopping by the clinic only at night. But alas, the sudden freedom was too sweet to be restrained, and just as a deprived child gets sick when given overwhelming
amounts of candy, I crossed a line that I was not supposed to cross.
The exhilarating feeling of not having to match my life to the every needs of a certain person
was refreshing. I loved Delilah, without a doubt, but she did not make me happy. And this month was
when I had an epiphany: what was love, what was its importance if it did not benefit me in any way.
Never before would I have imagined such a daring action, but with Delilah seeming to be in