Face to Face

Tyra didn’t care about the creak of the rickety wooden door as she kicked it open to stride into the barn. The musty shadows no longer frightened her, nor did the smell of rotting hay deter her.

“I want an answer,” she announced, planting herself in the middle of the space to await the arrival of the old woman.

A soft groan sounded from the broken gallery above, followed by a series of shuffles and creaks. “Oh my!” exclaimed the old woman’s husky voice. “You would think that frequent conversations with my younger self would recall some of my youthful vitality, but I think it does just the opposite.” She found her feet on firm ground at last and came to sit on the upturned trough lying in front of Tyra. “It only reminds me how old I have become.”

Tyra did her best to keep her eyes fixed on the old woman instead of rolling them – an effort which the old woman showed her appreciation of with a knowing smile.

“You know, I am still awaiting the day when you will come to talk to me simply because you miss my presence rather than my knowledge.”

The eyes rolled around; Tyra couldn’t help it this time. “Trust me, the last person I am going to miss is myself. I wish I could leave my present self alone here in this barn, too, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet.”

“All in good time,” said old Tyra. “How do you think I got here?”

“Tempting. But that’s not the question I want to waste today’s answer on.”

“Really? Would it be a waste, do you think?”

“I have more pressing things to know,” Tyra boasted, impressed with the way she was ignoring the old woman’s lopsided grin.

“For instance?” old Tyra prompted, now showing off her pale teeth.

Tyra shuddered. It was hard not to reach up to touch her face to make sure those wrinkles had not already found their way onto her skin. “I broke up with him again yesterday. Is it forever this time?”

The smile finally gave way to a short chuckle as the old woman hung her head back to look at the splintering rafters. “Oh, this is an amusing part of our life, isn’t it?” She refocused her attention on Tyra, her eyes almost twinkling beneath their dull hue. “How did it happen?”

Now it was Tyra’s turn to raise her eyes to the rafters, though in exasperation rather than humour. “Please don’t ask stupid questions.” She barely had the energy to whisper, and it didn’t help that a lump was starting to form in her throat as she fought to push out her words. “The whole point of coming to talk to you is because you already know everything, so I don’t have to explain it all.”

If the old woman noticed Tyra’s breaking voice, she didn’t give any indication of the fact. “I might have known once,” she reasoned, “but you can’t expect me to remember now.”

“Oh, of course you would say that,” Tyra spat, kicking the dust as she turned back to the rickety door. “I don’t know why I expect anything from you! And I should know, I’m—”

“Tyra.” The old woman had risen from her seat and just managed to reach her hand to Tyra’s shoulder before the young woman could close the door on her way out. “I don’t remember because it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Tyra inhaled to utter another retort, but the old woman didn’t give her time to say it.

“But I know this much,” she persisted, gripping her hand onto Tyra’s shoulder to keep her from fleeing. “It’s all you can think about right now and you feel like freezing in place or running far away, so you don’t have to live another day with him or even you on your mind. You feel a moment of peace at the thought of being on your own again and then a rush of guilt a moment later for leaving him behind.”

The ribbon of sunlight that had fallen in from outside looked so warm and inviting. Tyra never thought she could be jealous of a sunray. Even the blade of grass a few steps away seemed oddly attractive – there was the simple, carefree existence she longed for.

“You miss him and don’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed. You think of going back, but you don’t know whether it will cause him further pain or bring him happiness. You try to think of moving on, but even your life before him doesn’t seem possible anymore. And finally, you don’t want to bother anyone else or let them think any ill of him, so you come to the one person who already knows your whole story and the only person you can bear to offend: me – that is, yourself.”

Tyra wanted to stomp on that wretched blade of grass and slam the door on the golden ray. “Very helpful,” she chided, though she was at least relieved that the old woman had finally shut up. “Thank you for describing my problem and not offering a solution. I’ll remember that next time I need to be reminded how miserable my life is.” She wrenched herself free of the old woman’s grasp with too much force than was needed, then scuffed the rest of the way out the door, only to falter in front of the grass as though goading an effort from the old woman to make her stay.

But old Tyra simply sighed and went back to sit on the trough, clasping her frail hands together and staring at the stale animal droppings littering the dirt. The first she noticed of Tyra’s decision to turn back to the barn was when the young woman appeared in her periphery and sat down beside her, apparently to conduct her own examination of the droppings. The fat, round ones belonged to cows that had long since fertilised the ground better than their waste, the crumbling pebbles were all that was left of the sheep, the horses had left their mark with the bumpy mounds, and as for the chickens, they could only be traced by the stains that remained on some of the strands of straw.

The old woman bent and picked up a clean piece of straw, rolling it back and forth between her fingers. “Do you remember how worried you were when you had to decide what to do when you finished school?”

Tyra sighed. “Couldn’t we focus on the current problem? If you hadn’t noticed, I’m not really worried about that anymore.”

“Precisely,” said old Tyra. “But you were worried about it then.”

Tyra sat back slightly to cast a sceptical glance on the old woman. “What’s your point?”

“Problems always seem bigger than they are in the moment, but later on you barely spare a thought for them and sometimes even forget about them completely.”

“Doesn’t mean they don’t still exist.”

“No. But perhaps they don’t matter as much as they seem to.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Tyra scoffed. “You’ve already lived through all our problems, so of course—”

“So now I see them for what they really were,” the old woman interjected with irritating smoothness. She shoved the piece of straw into Tyra’s line of sight. “See how big this piece of straw looks up close to your face? It’s almost blocking your vision, isn’t it?” With a thrust of her arm, she flung the flimsy stick away from her, letting it flutter to the ground amongst the rest. “I know you can still see it but look how small and ordinary it is now, laying with all the others. If you look away for long enough, you might even forget which piece it is altogether.” She turned towards Tyra. “That’s how I see our life – the joys as well as the problems.”

“Okay,” Tyra conceded and took a deep breath before continuing. She was gazing intently at the scattered clumps of straw in a desperate effort to ignore the image of ‘him’ that kept appearing in her mind’s eye. “So, how do you suppose I look at my breakup, which happened yesterday, from a distance? It’s a lot easier to throw a piece of straw to the ground than an actual problem, you know.”

A gust of wind blew in from the open door, lifting the pieces into the air where they twirled about before being set down again in new places that could not be distinguished from the old ones. Old Tyra grinned with excitement, but her younger counterpart finally lost hold of herself and let out a sob as her crestfallen mask shattered into a shrivelled mess, brows furrowed, eyes screwing shut with tears nevertheless seeping through, nose and cheeks squished above her curling lips. The old woman had to refrain from remarking that she looked almost as wrinkled as herself and had to be contented merely with gently rubbing Tyra’s back while forcing her grin away. She glanced over at the rickety door and noticed that the wind had pushed it closed except for a small slit between the wall where the light still squeezed through, heedless of the narrow space. “I do know the answer to your question,” she murmured and let her gaze fall across her bare, bony fingers laying on Tyra’s back. “But I don’t think it would help you.”

Tyra whimpered and buried her red, wet face in her hands.

“Would you have chosen any differently when you finished school if I had told you you weren’t going to like childcare even though you had decided to do it? Would you have chosen not to go out with him if I had told you it wouldn’t work out in the end even though you wanted him then?”

Tyra twisted her head to the side and peered up at the old woman through her fingers. “So it is forever, then?” she croaked.

“I didn’t quite say that,” old Tyra told her softly. “I just meant if that were true and I told you so, you wouldn’t choose any differently even now.”

Back she flopped, now bending all the way to her knees for a place to cry into. “So, what do I do, then?”

The smile that grew on the old woman’s face wasn’t wide and whimsical like the previous ones. This time it was faint, barely discernible below the melancholy gaze that had come over her eyes. “When I was in the present, I was already trying to see my life from the future. At every turning point, I wanted to know the result before I began the journey. Until one day, I found myself here in this old barn and I suddenly realised that I, too, was old with no more future to look forward to and no present to live in. All I have now is the past to look back on as I sit here and wonder how different my life would have been if I had let my problems remain in the moment they belonged to.” She reached down and pulled Tyra’s hands into her own as she stood to her feet. “Up you get, then.” Giving Tyra’s arm a light yank, they walked to the rickety door. “The choice is yours, Tyra. You can keep looking to me if you want to, but why not try looking in here for a change?” She touched her finger to Tyra’s heart and leaned in as though to share a secret. “You might find someone who knows you even better than I do.”

Finally, the young woman found her own small smile and with one last look at old Tyra, she opened the rickety door and stepped outside.

As for the old woman, all Tyra would have seen had she looked back was the ray of sunlight illuminating the old barn with a golden haze.