Tragic Tuesday: One for Sorrow
Greg was…blank.
Sitting on his sofa he couldn’t even remember what he was wearing. The idea of looking down – dropping his head maybe 60 degrees, allowing his eyes to settle and focus, kick-starting his brain to make meaning of the images – was far too complex.
He sat still, eyes dull, unfocussed as they stared somewhere between the wall and the carpet. The rise and fall of his chest felt like a victory each time – a hollow victory, with nothing to show for it but an extra second of life sustained.
He could feel his lungs expanding only as much as necessary. His head lolled a little with each inhalation, neck muscles too lax to hold the weight still. The air was expelled fast, as soon as his diaphragm relaxed, leaving a gap between breaths.
There was nothing to measure time except his breathing, and he was not keeping count.
His body was separated, each piece floating alone.
He could not feel his feet. They were there in a weird, third-person sense; the nerves had stilled as the stimulation remained constant. Neural adaptation, his brain supplied. One guess where that snippet had come from.
His fingers rested on something. He could feel each fingertip resting against something, the tendons neither stretching nor curling his fingers. Not flat, or warm, or cold…His brain stumbled slowly through adjectives until he realised there was other information.
Knees. Something was resting on his knees. That made sense, he thought with an effort.
Yeah.
They felt swollen, as though the rush of blood was pushing harder than usual against constrictive capillary walls. It pulsed in time with his heart, and he fancied he could feel the slight delay between the heartbeat and the throb in his fingers. Moving them was impossible, though the reality was moot. What would he need to move for? There was nobody to greet. No handshake, hug or drink to be offered. No hand to take or face to caress.
It was just him and his sofa and the increasingly pointless throb in his capillaries.
Why carry oxygen all the way there if nothing was happening? Why not just…stop?
Because the heart is a muscle, with no idea about desperate loneliness, bitter regret, the fear of a future shaped by someone who so clearly holds no regard for you.
No idea of the things that pass through his brain every day, save the few precious moments that show him a shadow of what he had been like. What he could be, if the crippling fear was gone. If it could burn away the memories of that matter-of-fact voice, the one that had declared love a million breaths ago, before the indifference had crept in. Before the day his future had been ripped to shreds, his secure future now dangling on the whim of that uncaring shadow of the man he’d loved so desperately.
But the black bird was here, and like the one for sorrow of the nursery rhyme echoing his childhood, it seemed to have settled in for the long haul.
Not that it mattered.
Nothing could touch him now.
He was nothing.
I am nobody
Nothing
Atoms and energy, like grass and leaves
As deceptive as a cloud
You think I am visible but
Up close I dissipate
And you were mistaken
I am nobody
Nothing
Not even the grass and leaves.
They were not his words, but they were his soul.
