Smothering Emptiness

The shrill noise of the alarm woke him up; he sat up bewildered for a while, not knowing where he was. Then he looked to his right with squinted eyes searching for someone.

She was smiling in her slumber. “Ah, what an endearing smile” he thought. He could look at her forever, not quite the way he did when he’d first met her, but still. It was different. He hadn’t hoped for anything. He’d always liked her, but it seemed he’d never wanted her this bad.

It was drizzling outside, and the window was open with a narrow gap, to let the breeze in. He looked at her captivated, at how her brown hair caressed her cheek. Closing the window, he advanced towards her, and as he did, he knew the kind of euphoria that was taking over him; he felt it wash over him every time she nestled against his chest claiming for her whims.

He smiled and stroked the thin dreadlocks which covered her beautiful caramel eyes. She moaned in her sleep, moaned like a child caught between waking and dream. He sighed; the thought of her waking up faltered his hopes. His fate eluded him, he knew. He knew that in a few seconds she’d wake up and end this with a loud cry followed by a whimper. He dithered, obscured by thoughts of her. He didn’t have a choice. He’d have to let her venture through the desolated life she had now, where she did have beautiful mornings, enchanting sunsets and sunrises but without him. He was no more a part of her. Her fairytale had lost the prince it had coveted for, long ago, seemingly in another lifetime.

He knew it, knew it all. Yet he couldn’t resist coming every night to her tower, which was now mostly a cage that she was happy to reside in. He sneaked into her bed just to take in her scent, just to look at her sleep and breathe every night after everyone had gone to sleep.

She was his sanctuary. He wanted to touch her and see her laugh a childish laughter like she did before, for one last time.
It felt like a year had passed when he’d last held her, and his heart clenched with this thought. He wanted to leave, and he knew he had to in some time, but something was always holding him back. It was her smile, the smile she had when she had first seen a glimpse of their daughter. The pain smothered inside of him, making a hole inside his heart. Things would have been so much better if it just did not happen; the atrocious accident which turned their world upside down.

A sudden whimper brought him back to his senses; she was awake. She took one long look at him, and with a sudden blow, she jerked her hands off him. She dithered, having a vague feeling of recognition. It was then that he hoped, hoped for her to recover from the plight. But she called for help in that voice which he could not recognize now. He stood up at once, then, refusing to put her into more pain, he strode away quickly; just like that, the voice in his head screaming that he’d never turn around.

He turned. How could he not? Wasn’t it what they both did every time they went away from each other? He looked back at her, her hospital gown untidily falling around her illness-racked body, pleading for her to look at him in his mind. Or maybe he was just pleading for her to find back her old mind, the one that he could read, the one that could read him.

But she was in her own world now, her world of dragon’s flying spaceships and ghosts that have no teeth, the world he’s now eluded of. He left the place with not a hope of getting her back, or even surrendering his own sanity and meeting those intriguing figments of her now neurotic imagination.

He left the hospital room which held the mother of his dead child, who now herself was as a demented child, and walked out into the rain, truly forgotten, but not forgetting.

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