THE GIRL ON THE HILL

 

The Girl on the Hill

There's this frozen image for me of the girl on the hill. I see her each week. I think it's usually on Wednesdays when she is there. She climbs the long cement staircase from the back entrance of the church and turns around after the top step to face away from me. She looks beyond the house of prayer playground, across the street to the large white building with big blooming trees behind it.

She's sensing, staring at something. Immobilized. Her reverie is prolonged and painful to witness. The girl looks and stays, sobbing from swollen red eyes, shoulders shaking, convulsively crying, her eyes, big round bulging balls of bloated swollen-shut grief, seemingly an endless well with tears overflowing that plop past her legs to the pavement.

She cries and cries and stays and stares.

I see a soul in pain. Deep saturated unadulterated pain. The girl on the hill shakes, a whole-body shaking, a visceral response to an unknown catastrophe, a vibrational outcome to overgrown grief.

The weight of her heartbreak grips me in a profound clench. I cannot look away and I want so much to hold her, to tell her that whatever it is will not be permanent, that she will go on in life to live and laugh and love again.

Somebody hurt her. Hurt her hard. She looked like a normal nice person who didn't deserve whatever had happened to her, whatever someone did to her. I could tell. It was the way she carried herself – the curves of her body – how they heaved when she wept in a potent but dignified personal way. It's difficult to explain. She probably wanted to scream out, to fall down those steps, or prostrate herself permanently so that her pain could collapse into the concrete and be part of the pavement on top of the hill. Instead, it wracked her body and soul and she stood alone against the onslaught of Spirit demolition, brutally broken, but still resilient. It's why I watched every week for her, to witness the gutsy girl, who despite devastation, came to this spot and did the same thing and I wondered what I might be able to eventually do for her.

I imagined every premise. A lost love, a devastating setback, a medical anomaly that could not be helped, a religious reason for being there in church, any missed opportunity, death, debt, divorce ... something had clearly broken this girl in unspeakable structure and it touched me in ways I cannot articulate.

When she finally turns around to walk to her car, she limps a little bit. She's injured. Her face registers pain and profound grief. Wailing each week after an appointment wasn't helping at all. Leaving with eyes puffed closed only risked her swollen life to drive. She hitches slowly towards a Honda Accord. The girl on the hill is mortally wounded, soulfully and physically. I make up stories about her in my mind, imagining various scenarios about what could possibly have come about to undo this poor girl. What does she do every week inside the church? Who does she see that makes her weep?

Who or what is over in the distant white building that she stands and stares at? It makes her sob harder. The vision of her moves me so. I cannot look away even as I cannot bear the sight of her intense sadness either.

The gloominess is ugly and anguished, especially the crimson eyes where her soul is leaking from. Her heart is too wide open, practically visible on her left shoulder as it edges out of her heaving chest, and the force of combustion squeezes her swollen face still tighter together. With one last look, the girl over yonder on the hill turns to get into her car and I briefly see them better, those eyes, ruddy and compressed closely shut from the exhaustion of her.

Her weekly session thus ends in palpable pain, with her right hand holding a clutched wad of wet facial tissues punctuating her heavy hurt; with glimpses still on the horizon in the near distance, looking at a building to focus on nothing knowable.

What was she looking at over there? What did she see? What was she imagining? What did she do inside that church every Wednesday? Where did she go? What does she know? I think she knows too much about something or someone and it is destroying her.

I used to simply observe from afar and carry on with whatever I was doing. When I noticed the same girl with the same sadness every week, I stopped and watched and after awhile I started to wait for her, wondering why the girl on the hill did this every time and what did it mean and why was she wounded?

I knew she'd be there. It was clockwork. A timed impairment moment when her existence hurt her so badly that she could not bear to simply get in her car and carry on, drive away into her future.

It was a ritual. An odd ritual, but a ritual nonetheless. She looked across to a building. Frozen in position, pleading with Angels to help her, was what I imagined. Who was she thinking about? Why did she come to this church every Wednesday, walk down those steps, disappear for an hour and come out crying?

What the hell happened to her. Who was the girl on the hill and what was her soul expanding to accept?

There's a girl on the hill. I see her. I see her trying to squeeze shut against whatever pain every Wednesday brings. I stop and look. I watch. I wait. I wonder. What did it mean?

The girl's grief grabbed me so hard, it wouldn't let go. It sometimes choked the happy out of me, not only on Wednesdays, but on other days when I'd remember Wednesday. She was me.

One Wednesday, a massive flock of small black birds flew into that big tree behind that white building that the girl on the hill always stopped and stared at. The birds covered the big ball of orange leaves on the rounded tree and rested. It was a Holy sight to see, black covering orange, the birds blocking the leaves. That's the last day that I ever saw the girl on the hill.

She came out while the birds were still sitting there and something about her that day told me that I would never see her again. She stood for a prolonged time, until the tree emptied itself of the birds and stood brilliant hued again.

I think about her all of the time. It's been more than a decade and most Wednesdays, I still watch out the window and look to see if she might be there. It's become a habit. Especially when the ball of fire tree turns orange and then weeps its leaves off one by one over autumn weeks, I remember the girl on the hill and I pray for her.

After I stopped seeing her there, I suffered. My grief, not explainable. I didn't know her, but I wanted to. I didn't know her, but felt like I did. Watching her every week, every Wednesday, I knew she'd been through something barely survivable. Either she made it through or she didn't. I'd never know what happened and I never saw her again. Not on Wednesday or any other day. But I never forgot her either.

The girl on the hill.

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