AN: Don’t ask me where this piece came from. It’s unfinished for now. I might add a little more later on, but those who are fairly observant might note that the guy could very well be a certain redhead rurouni from a certain anime. *laughs* I think I’m leaving it just as an original piece for now.
Dedications: To K-chan, who has been nothing but supportive of the stuff I keep cranking out. *GLOMPS*
**********
Around me, it rained cherry blossoms. I spread my arms wide, inhaling the scent that made my senses reel. It was there that I could pretend for a moment that I was a child once again. It was there that I could pretend that reality didn’t just bleed into my self-imposed fantasy world.
Giddily, I spun myself in that same outstretched pose, laughing as cherry blossoms tickled my nose and skin on their way to the ground. I delighted in the feel of the soft petals brushing against my face. For one moment, I could be happy here.
I didn’t know what happiness was. Wouldn’t know what to do with it even if it came up to me and bit me in the ass. But here I was, twirling around like some six year old child, lost in some long-forgotten memory probably borrowed from some movie I had seen too long ago. It was only in living and breathing this moment that I could almost pretend that I was happy.
The soft footfalls alerted me of another presence. I could feel my body tensing in response, and everything in me just shut down. I can’t explain it. No one can possibly understand what I go through, and what I have to live in my mind every day. No one can understand my need for freedom. I dream of a day where the breeze will send my hair ruffling, and the warm sun would just beat on my face, and I would never remember the ugly sordid past. But he presents himself.
The gait was all too familiar – the slight shuffling, and steady pace that signified who it was. My hands fall limply to the side, and the brief taste of freedom I had just died abruptly. I see the pain in his eyes, and the expression on his face that I would take to my grave. But I was no longer that girl he fell in love with, just as he was no longer that man.
“How are you doing?” Ever polite, voice a husky baritone that used to send shivers up my spine. Now, I felt nothing.
I gave him a blank smile. The comforting haze was coming back for me again. I can feel it creeping upon me once more. The sunshine was gone. My baby was never coming back. He had killed her, just as he surely killed me. I knew rationally that it wasn’t his fault, just as it wasn’t mine. But delusions fill me all too easily, blocking out the pain and the need to hurt.
For now, it was so easy to sink into it. It was far easier to not live than it was to.
***********
The walls are crowding in again. I sit alone in my room, the window my sole companion. Sunshine streams in and I can’t feel the warmth. I feel suffocated. I can’t breathe. I want to surface for air but the haze holds me down. If I allowed myself to, the pain would surely destroy me.
“Mama!”
Voices ring in my head. I hear a variety of a time long gone, back in the days of happiness. I can hear the different voices – best friends, enemies, lovers, and family. The haze has lifted unexpectedly. I can feel now. Her voice stands out most of all, her toothy grin filling my mind.
The thoughts are invasive, raping my heart with its memories. I don’t want this. I don’t want to think about a life where I didn’t have her. The pain is coming on, and the haze isn’t protecting me anymore.
“You have someone here to see you,” a voice chimes.
No. I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t want anyone to see what the hell I’m living. I don’t want to feel. I want to run. I want to feel the little heartbeat in me once again, where I can protect her and keep her safe from reality.
I look up and see his eyes damning me. To think that once upon a time, we had shared everything – the laughter, the pain, the tears, and the joy. We had so much love, all the love in the world really. We were blindly and passionately in love, and from that love came the most precious gift.
Like all things in life, something readily given can be taken away just as easily. I was foolish. I was stupid. I hated him. I hated how he had let me down. I hated how the hours at work took him away from me. I hated how the baby screamed into all hours of the night, her body far too weak. I hated myself for letting her die. I hated myself.
The screams emerge from my throat before I can help it. The sound, loud and piercing, startle the two present. I grab my head, willing the memories and the guilt to go away. I scream even louder, my naked pain that haunts me no matter where I go. The haze won’t come back anymore. It won’t protect me like he once vowed to.
I pull at my hair, the physical pain barely registering. I scream as if my soul has been taken against my will. I scream for my daughter who never had a chance. I scream for my husband who I blamed needlessly. I scream for me.
His hands clutch my arms and he pulls me close. I struggle and I feel a strange wetness against my face. To my surprise, it is his tears. The screams die in my throat, and for the first time, I really see him.
His eyes, once so brilliant, look so tired. Lines of weariness are etched everywhere. Faint strands of gray have touched his hair. And he looks so lonely and so in pain – just like me. My own eyes start to burn, and the shared pain is there.
I feel the sharp sting on my arm, and he looks apologetic.
“Betrayer,” I manage to get out before the drugs get me. He would drown me with his own bare hands if he could.
************
The faint numbness that fills me is not unusual. My body feels as if it’s weighed down by lead. The needle that subdues me is the one that kills me. As my eyes struggle to see a world too painful for me to live, I am shocked by the sight in front of me.
He sits there, silent and watching.
I try to move but the drugs are still weaving their magic in me. The air of shame lingers around him as he gets up.
“Stop it,” he says, voice sounding as tired as I’ve ever heard it.
Stop what? Stop something that I’m powerless to control? How easy it is to loathe him and give into the hatred?
His touch is gentle as he cups my cheek. For one second, I can almost pretend that we’re still young, foolishly in love, and the proof of it lives in my now barren womb.
It’s not there anymore, just as she’s not there.
Still the pain lingers.
“I’d do anything to take that night back. She’s gone, but you’re still here. I know you’re still living somewhere in there. The pain that never goes away, the nightmares that fell more like reality than whatever it is you’ve created for yourself – I know.”
How could he possibly know what it’s like to say goodbye to someone who’s lived in you for nine months? How could he possibly understand the guilt that I have to live with?
“I wuv you, Mama.”
The resentment grows every day. The bad days outweighed the good. I was a young wife, forced to abandon her dreams for the sake of a child and a husband that was never around anymore. He was probably screwing around on me. There was a woman far more attractive that I was, without the burden of a child.
Yet every time I look into her eyes, I feel the contradicting mix of love and bitterness.
I think that was when God began to punish me.
I remember the yelling, the angry shouts, the tears that flowed down my cheeks. Almost as if I had detached myself from my physical being, I could see myself throwing objects angrily at him.
I could see the porcelain doll that had once been my favourite childhood memory falling to the ground.
The breaking.
The pieces.
The shards everywhere.
Ripped apart like I was.
Destroyed by my own hands.
And the eyes of raped innocence staring back at me, chubby face wobbling with fear.
“Mama?”
I remember picking her off the ground, and him going off in a rage. My feet carry me forth, propelled by my loneliness, my fears, my guilt – all my emotions that were never far. Her cries upset me even further, and I shouted even louder. I was positive I had woken up the entire neighbourhood with my voice.
I could see him opening the car door and him sliding into it. I could see him leaving my life and hers forever. My loving burden that I never asked for, hated and loved just as equally. I remember chasing after him, not caring.
After that, all I heard was the angry squeal of tires, the motions of running as my dress caught on his car door, her frightened sobs, and then no more.
Pieces of me.
Scattered around.
Drenched with her blood.
And mine.
Never the same.
Never more.
The pain is bludgeoning me now. It hurts far more than I ever recall. The memories I sought so hard to repress are hanging onto me like a serial killer. The shell crumbles. The shell breaks.
The tears fall, and I’m shaking. I’m blinded by everything but the pain. Coupled with the guilt, it rips me apart.
I’m adrift in a storm with no end in sight.
I’ve replayed that scene so many times in my head till my mind feels like it’s going to bleed. I’ve tried everything imaginable to stop it. Nothing works. The haze did – once. Now, even it has abandoned me, just like my husband had.
But he is here now, by my side, sharing my pain, living my guilt that I have sobbed for the world to see. He now knows the evil within me, and the resentment I had over someone as beautiful and as special as she was. Someone who was created out of pure love and represented all the things I wasn’t.
I keep crying, the pain sending me further out to oblivion. If only I could go a little further…
Somehow my hands are entangled in his. He does nothing else but hold my hands as we both cry over the death of the best part of ourselves.
Some day I dream of walking in sunshine.