29/01/2025
A piece of prose for a change, (quite distressing, but pure imagination, not something that I've experienced).
Sometimes:
Sometimes I look up at the sky and wonder what lies beyond the blue. I feel so alone and insignificant against the backdrop of the universe. Since you left there is nothing to anchor me to this lonely world, I am adrift in a sea made from tears but I am numb, cold and all cried out. I finish my tea and go inside.
I have begun to hate this place with all its reminders of you, the plates you bought, the coffee that's your favourite, the colour of the paint applied by you. And the photos I can't bear to look at and can't bring myself to remove. I think we were happy then though maybe we never truly were. After it happened, the thing we could never speak of, the last shoots of our love withered and sputtered out like the embers of a dying fire. I still can't speak about it now though my mother thinks it's important to talk it through and insists that I need counselling. What's the point? Talking won't fix things, won't bring you back, won't change what happened. Sometimes I feel I'll never speak again my voice a distant echo fading out into the vastness of space. I should sleep but sleep is a precious commodity hard to come by these days and plagued by fitful nightmares when it does. Once more I stare at the medicine cabinet and wonder how it would be to never wake again.
I know I should eat but the fridge is bare and my appetite has deserted me. Going out to the shops is a gargantuan hurdle that I can't scale. I'm getting pale and too thin but food just chokes me. I glance at the medicine cabinet again. Soon they will want me back at work, maybe I should but the thought just leaves me hollow, I'm dead inside. Nothing seems to matter any more. I run a bath and think about drowning. But I lack the courage to end it all, to find out what exists beyond the blue. I wonder if this is how crazy feels.
Sometimes I sit in the nursery, still as we left it: a cot, a mobile, a changing table, a rocking chair, a teddy bear. Tiny clothes folded on shelves, tiny shoes, never to be worn. I torture my mind with fantasies of a baby never destined to be born and once more I imagine our baby somewhere beyond the blue and I long to join her, leave this plane for good. I'm tired, so tired. I rock back and forth and find my voice as I start to sing, barely perceptible, hush little baby don't say a word...
Sometime later I wake still in the rocking chair. It's dark outside and I'm groggy from a dream where I'm lost in a cave crying out for you but you don't hear me. I rub my eyes and stare at the dark shape of the cot fooling myself for a moment that I hear a baby cry. My breasts ache, my womb aches, my head aches. I heave myself up and struggle to the door in the darkness wondering why I torture myself in this room. I stumble downstairs to the kitchen and make coffee. I know I should clear out the nursery but I can't, I just can't, it's all I have of the beautiful little girl who lives in my mind. I turn to YouTube on my phone and a moment later Patsy Cline croons crazy.... And I am crazy, crazy for loving you. You left me, left me when I needed you most and I don't know how to come up for air, don't know how to breathe without you. Oh what I'd give to feel your arms around my waist, to taste your kisses, to dance with you, smoke a joint together, looking up at the sky and laughing. But you are not the man I thought you were and I am no longer that woman but a husk of myself, dried up and empty. I stare yet again at that medicine cabinet but this time I open it and count out little blue pills....
©Jennifer Bogert
