TM: Topic 129: When I awoke the next morning...
prompt: 129
word count: 254
When I awoke the next morning...
...the sun was impossibly bright, despite the curtains, drawn and secured - I had believed - against just this situation. My eyes were thin squints, my fingers struggling to pull the curtains tighter drawn. None of this sunlight nonsense, none of this morning rubbish!
When darkness reigned again, I began to remember.
That's how it happens - at first, hard and sharp and heavy, but eventually it softens into this - this pain almost bearable, this "oh, yes, for a moment I'd forgotten," this burden you've carried so long you forget its presence, and what it would feel like to set it down.
It creeps in on you like sunlight through half-drawn curtains, grief poking and peeking and pestering you while you try to draw the heavy cloth of numbness (let me alone, let me sleep for just a while longer, let me pretend they're not d- they're not de- they can't be, they can't--) -- until you remember that they can, they can and they are.
When I awoke that first morning, I pulled the curtains as tight as I could, and huddled in the dark and sobbed until my eyes were pools of mud.
But when I awoke the next morning, it was a little easier to bear- and the next morning, easier still- until I awoke the next morning, and I opened the curtains, and sat by the window, my chin in my hand and my elbow on the window sill, and looked out into the sunlit morning.
word count: 254
When I awoke the next morning...
...the sun was impossibly bright, despite the curtains, drawn and secured - I had believed - against just this situation. My eyes were thin squints, my fingers struggling to pull the curtains tighter drawn. None of this sunlight nonsense, none of this morning rubbish!
When darkness reigned again, I began to remember.
That's how it happens - at first, hard and sharp and heavy, but eventually it softens into this - this pain almost bearable, this "oh, yes, for a moment I'd forgotten," this burden you've carried so long you forget its presence, and what it would feel like to set it down.
It creeps in on you like sunlight through half-drawn curtains, grief poking and peeking and pestering you while you try to draw the heavy cloth of numbness (let me alone, let me sleep for just a while longer, let me pretend they're not d- they're not de- they can't be, they can't--) -- until you remember that they can, they can and they are.
When I awoke that first morning, I pulled the curtains as tight as I could, and huddled in the dark and sobbed until my eyes were pools of mud.
But when I awoke the next morning, it was a little easier to bear- and the next morning, easier still- until I awoke the next morning, and I opened the curtains, and sat by the window, my chin in my hand and my elbow on the window sill, and looked out into the sunlit morning.