With the crescent moon, Aida wakes up with new intentions; fresh beginnings, and a keen desire to forget Dhirar. He’s not the first person or thing she thinks about this morning. He’s not the first person she speaks to anymore. The gaiety of her usual routine with him is over, but she has moved past moping. She can function somewhat normally. She has accepted that her battle is not unlike many other women who have loved and lost, and loved and lost, and the deeper the enamored state of their hearts, the longer they shed tears. In the end, it was not an unusual relationship in the way that it began nor in the way that it ended.

But love is fickle and her lover is tricky; unintentionally of course. He has stamped himself upon her whole existence in such a profound manner that even something simple like going about her toilette or cooking a meal cannot be done without remembering his words, his gestures, his voice, or his laugh. Sometimes she finds her self shaking her head, smiling, or lost in pensive thought at something she has remembered him saying or doing.

Aida flicks on the TV and happily finds that a movie is showing. She has wanted to see it for a long time. She decides to get comfortable and watch. The lover is gone to war, a Civil War, and he has grown a beard. Aida looks at the actor and studies his countenance. Something appears familiar about him. She experiences a yearning, unable to remove her eyes from the screen. She gazes at his beard, his mustache, his lips, his expressive eyes. Only when the movie is half over does the realization descend upon her and she gazes at the screen with shock. He looks like Dhirar. It is the same expression. She surely must be mad. She sees him everywhere and at the least expected times.

Aida walks slowly towards the large LCD screen. The actor’s face fills it, his eyes are pools of bright turquoise. She traces his eyebrows with her red nails and then her fingers caress the outline of his beard. The actor seems to embody Dhirar now, to look at her as she stands there in her momentary insanity. His eyes speak to her of a love so deep, that she suddenly finds herself gasping for breath. Aida spreads her arms to embrace the width of the cold screen and rubs her face against the actor’s, moving her lips slowly across his, feeling the warmth of his breath. Tears of frustration fill her eyes, black rivulets of tears mixed in kohl stream down her cheeks in straight, harsh lines. She showers the screen with kisses, and whispers “Why?” over and over. But the actor’s blue eyes are unseeing.

Aida throws herself back onto the long wide sofa and wraps herself in the velvety brown throw. The air conditioner has turned the room into an icy receptacle which is comforting. She realizes with annoyance that the screen is now blurry with her lipstick and lip gloss, where she had kissed it in a bereft frenzy.

Out of a sense of duty, she gets up to clean it. She goes into the bathroom to fetch a damp towel and there she is struck by her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are comically panda like, and her lips are swollen with only a hint of colour.

Aida bends over the sink and with the damp towel, begins to remove the traces of tears on her face. She begins slowly but works up to a vigorous scrub where she imagines changing her feelings towards Dhirar. She imagines opening her chest and removing her warm, tender heart and replacing it with pieces of the mirror before her. A mirror that is sharp, dangerous, and with the ability to reflect the intentions of all those who come to invade her space. A deflector to guard her against the whimsies of such Strawberry Moons.