She used to have another best female friend back in the bad old days. A friend who betrayed her, who betrayed her trust and torn into pieces her belief in people.

It didn't take much for that to happen. She has sinned, in her friend's eyes. She has sinned by not agreeing with her point of view, by seeing things in a different light and refusing to be drawn into a melodramatic situation for no apparent reason.

I will never forgive you, her friend declared after she realized that for the first time since the two of them met things would not go the way she wanted them to. And she never did forgive her.

Some women are drama queens by nature. They just like to blow things out of proportion to make their little boring lives a bit more interesting. And they keep looking for excuses to cry, to get angry, to blame someone else for their failures. Anyone will do, just as long as they think they can control the narrative.

Nadia knows that everybody lies. But mostly they lie to themselves, as they think they are always right. And when something doesn't go their way in a conversation and things turn ugly they expect the other party to apologize. Then they are magnanimous in their forgiveness.

She's never asked for her now ex-friend's forgiveness. Instead she's moved on, all alone, as she's always had. She felt a little more lonely for awhile, but that loneliness blessed her with more strength and determination. Bring me down, step on me all you want, she thought, but you will never break me.

She was untamed. And despite the fact that the years have mellowed her down a bit, smoothed away some of her anger, untamed she still is. Not a wild animal, an uncaged soul.

Reinventing herself, again and again; that's what she's most interested in doing, and thus never standing still, never getting bored. You can reinvent yourself in small ways and in big ones, take calculated steps or leaps into the unknown. But the only true way of inventing yourself anew, is by placing your back on the wall, risking everything you have to gain an uncertain something.

Margarita understands her need to change all the time. She sees in her that thirst for adventure, for something new, and she keeps encouraging her without seeming to do so. She listens and she talks to her, and she gently pushes her forward when she has to. The two women complete each other, but they could never be one since Margarita has already found her better half in Dina, a tough cop, and a brilliant mind.

Why is everyone around me so sad? she can't help but wonder sometimes. Yes, almost everyone around her is sad, even the ones that are supposed to be happy. Perhaps it's the world they live in that makes them so, the things they see and learn day in and day out. The only two people she knows that are not sad is Tek, a former hacker that now works with the police, and Petros, M's father, who's his boss. Tek is happy just for being around tech, whereas the latter, despite everything finds happiness in the faces of his close colleagues and family, and in simple things, like a plate of food and a good glass of wine.

You are the only wino that doesn't whine, she told him the other day. And you are the only Tropical that cannot fly, he replied.

I need some time off, she keeps telling herself, but no she doesn't. What she needs is more help and finding a better way to organize her time.

She misses painting. She has a full room of half-painted canvases. They include portraits and still life, and some abstract constructs. She usually gives them ridiculous titles like: Lady on the Verge of Farting, Fat Man's Glues, Ponderous Pond, String of Consciousness, and so on and so forth.

When she first met M' and she started visiting there, guessing the paintings' names was one of the latter's favorite pastimes. Sometimes the titles she came up with were so ridiculous that Nadia ended up adopting them, while more than once the game brought half a smile on her face. Half a smile, that's all she could afford to offer back then.

She looks forward to summer, it won't be long now. Then she'll have some time to herself, since Christina has agreed to start working part-time with them when the school year was over. It was M's idea actually, but she needed no convincing either. She could see how much C' needed to do something like that. But she also thought that though things could get tough sometimes, her being there would serve as a great school for the young woman.

Though it was Angela that have adopted C' it was M' and N' that fast became her atypical best friends. M' was a good judge of character and a great student at the school of Petros, as she called it, and N' was tough, streetwise. If they combined their gifts they could give her a helpful push into the new world.

Question every smile and every tear, not because you are a cynic but because sometimes they are no more than part of the scenery, N' has once told her, while M's advice came in the form of a question: How many times have you really fallen? That's the true measure of one's life.

C' has fallen badly, though it wasn't her fault, and now she's climbing up slowly. The two friends believe that it's their duty to accelerate her rise. No question, she will fall again in the future, but at least the next time she'll be better prepared for it.

How was I at sixteen? she asks herself aloud. A pointless question. She remembers exactly how she was. Angry, sad, ready to kill and to die. But C' is different. She's already been through hell, and she does not seek a paradise. Something to believe in, to hold on to, is what she needs.

Margarita, my dear, she thinks and smiles at the pale sun that just now starts to rise over the rooftops, it looks like we have our work cut out for us.

Lakis Fourouklas

The picture was taken from here.