The Wounded Fawn

"She spoke three words,
Silence echoed back,
But they were not the wrong words - only the wrong ears."

The car rolled slowly along the winding roads toward Ein-Ofer. The words accompanied Marceline on her return journey home. 

Memories wrapped around her like a tide - eternal and hushed. The orange rooftops of the houses, the vast, sprawling fields, the endless horizon.

Old.

Fire and water. A battlefield.

Fire that burned without respite. Fire that would not grant her peace. Water that swept her away, again and again, back to the same places, never allowing her to rest.

Air. But there was none to breathe.

She was suffocating.

She had never stopped asking herself questions - about pain, about feeling, about the past.

She returned, but even she did not know why.

Perhaps to find answers to the questions she had never dared to ask.

Perhaps because she felt that the past had never truly left her.

Perhaps because some things could be healed, even if they would never be the same again.

"They say only death is irreversible," someone had once told her.

She had never agreed.

As a child, Marceline had always felt different. Too pale, her eyes are brown, her hair too short. Her beauty was ethereal, but distant - drawing others close in admiration yet keeping them apart.

"You are delicate, like a fawn," her mother often told her. "Always searching for something you will never find."

And she had searched. She had truly searched.

She loved sitting by the sea, watching the fawns that roamed the fields beyond the village. They were mysterious, rare, elusive.

On the threshold of freedom. On the verge of escape. Just like her.

She met Ofer when she was nineteen, at university.

Not by chance.

He was her physics tutor. Tall, his golden hair catching the light like spun sunlight, his curls falling softly over his forehead. His honey-colored eyes were deep, piercing.

But it was not just his appearance.

He was brilliant, a genius, effortlessly talented. Science, thought, music - everything he touched became perfect. When he played the guitar, it was as if another melody, another dimension of physics, flowed through him.

She once saw him playing alone, his fingers moving delicately, like a black bird with broken wings, yearning to fly.

And she felt it too.

They shared an unspoken connection. Silent glances, fleeting moments that were never enough. He was quiet, yet his presence filled the room. He never sought to prove his intelligence, yet when he spoke, everyone listened.

"You know," he once told her after class, "sometimes I think I was meant to be a fawn in another life."

She smiled. "Me too."

Their conversations flowed effortlessly, yet beneath them laid deep, hidden layers.

And yet - they were different.

They were different. Not by choice, but by the land they came from, by the traditions that shaped them. Love, for her, had always felt like a tragedy - an unrelenting force pulling her toward rejection.

She stood at the precipice, teetering between love and mistake, yet fate had carved them for one another. She was delicate, ethereal, as if sculpted from the very essence of the fawn she so often resembled. And she came from Ein-Ofer, a place bearing the name of a deer’s offspring, an omen too weighty to dismiss as mere coincidence.

As time passed, the lines dividing them became clearer.

Marceline left physics after her first year and pursued biology, surrendering herself completely to it. Life pulled them in opposite directions, and their connection faded, like an old song.

But she never truly forgot him.

Years later, when she became a bat researcher, she found herself thinking of him again.

And then, something strange happened.

She began to see Ofer.

Among the cages, during late-night observations. Standing by the iron fence. Watching her through the window of her office.

Always there.

Was it truly him?

Or merely an illusion?

Was the universe trying to tell her something?

Someone once asked Michelangelo how he had created his masterpiece, the David.

"I did not create David," he replied. "He was already there, inside the marble. I only carved away what was unnecessary."

Perhaps that was what the universe was doing for her.

Carving. Cutting. Until only the pain remained.

One night, after a long research day, she wandered out by the iron fence of the fawn sanctuary.

Why had she returned here?

Perhaps to find a memory that would light her path.

Perhaps to meet herself again.

Perhaps because the battle within her had never truly ended.

She had always clung to rigid control, afraid that if she let go, she would be lost in the abyss.

But if she allowed the waters to quell the fire - 

What would be left of her?

Then she saw him.

The fawn.

Wounded.

His large, golden eyes met hers. His side bore a deep, open wound.

He had not fallen. He stood proudly, refusing to succumb to pain.

Her mind filled with questions.

Is that you?

Is this how you speak to me?

Or is it just my imagination?

If I move closer, will you disappear?

She whispered: "I am wounded too."

She took a step toward him, but he retreated, vanishing into the shadows.

Tears filled her eyes. "You can’t just disappear like that!"

But her gaze met only darkness. Only emptiness.

Had it been real?

Or merely a dream?

That night, she locked herself in her room and wrote in her journal:

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be lived. How does one live with pain like this? How does one exist, knowing they must carry it forever? The past binds us like chains of iron."

The days that followed felt like a dream. The fawns never truly disappeared.

But who was Ofer to her?

The man she had known?

The wounded fawn?

Or both?

Perhaps what she truly needed to understand was that love should never be compromised.

But she had compromised.

That had been her final escape.

At some point, she stopped looking for the fawns.

Not because she was tired.

Not because she no longer wanted answers.

But because she finally understood.

She had been running from herself.

And now, she was running toward a dream.

One morning, as the wind carried her final breath, she found herself before the sea.

She whispered: "Even if I am wounded, I can still go on."

Her words lingered in the air.

When they found her body on the shore, the sun had risen.

Her journal lay open in her hands. The final sentence read:

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be lived. Even if it hurts too much."

And she remembered - 

The words had never been wrong.

Only the ears that heard them.

“Sometimes leaving someone is also a love.”