The other day I was browsing through old ‘unfinished’ files, seeking inspiration, and found one that contained a line that had come to me in a dream a couple of years ago. With time to fill and a laptop with a full battery charge, I wrote the following short story / vignette from that line.

I deliberately kept the protagonist’s cause for grief vague. The important thing was the grief, not the story behind it.

The Woman in the Mirror

Using the palm of her hand, she wiped away the tears which had been flowing. Her heart felt blistered and hot, an unrelenting agony she had never believed in before it happened to her. She reached for her breast, pressing hard, but the pain continued unabated. More sobbing escaped her tight throat, though she tried to hold back. How long could a person cry before something snapped, before she wound up locked in a rubber-lined room? In her mind’s eye, a nightmare vision loomed: a huge hypodermic needle zooming in to stab her into oblivion. She blinked it away with a fierce sharp shake of the head.

“No!” she rasped a raw, voiceless whisper. “It’s only grief. This is normal!”

But deep down, she knew nothing was normal, nothing could ever be normal again. She felt certain this loss would break her, that it had already broken her. She expected to see shards of herself lying on the floor, and glancing down, she felt mildly surprised to find her flesh still intact.

After another lengthy bout of weeping, she pulled herself weakly to a sitting position. Her head pounded urgently. She needed something, she needed someone. Who could she call? There was nobody left. It was all gone. She was alone, would be alone forever, oh God, oh Jesus help…

“Stop that!”

She cringed at the shocking loudness of her own voice. “I can’t help it,” she cried, bursting into tears again. “It’s gone, everything is gone! I can’t stand it, I want to be dead!”

Surely she was going mad. She must do something to escape the ever-building pressure of this inescapable grief. She could feel the hole in her heart, a raw, bloody hole full of black death, and all her tears could not wash it from her.

“All right, Samantha,” she muttered, feeling giddy. “Let’s take you out for a nice walk. That’ll do you some good, I think!”

As she dressed, she focused on breathing, inhale following by exhale, feeling the sensations of her muscles moving, her weight shifting around her centre of gravity. Amazing how complicated the simple processes of locomotion and breathing were, she mused, once you really paid attention.

That’s it.

The ‘Be Here Now’ people were right, those new-age loonies her sister used to drag her to. They had the answer to freedom from pain.

Just pay attention to what’s happening in the moment, ignore everything else. Maybe I can do this.

The sudden grating shriek that escaped her lips caught her by surprise, knocked her off her feet into a huddled ball on the floor, half-pulled-up pants at her knees, arms wrapped protectively around the raw wound in her heart.

How do people recover from this kind of heartbreak? Is it even possible?

Maybe it’s time to pull the plug, slice my wrists and bleed real blood into a nice hot bath.

It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to her, and she pushed it away with a little less vigour each time.

Why not? Who is there to miss me? Who would even notice?

She stumbled into the bathroom to splash her puffy skin with cold water. As she toweled her face dry, she caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror. In that fleeting instant, she saw herself as she might see a beloved friend who was suffering terribly. The towel slipped from her hands. “Oh, my poor dear,” she whispered, reaching to stroke the trembling cheek, but touched only the cold hardness of the mirror. Her hand pressed against the glass as she gazed helplessly into the eyes of her despairing reflection.

“I so wish I could help you,” she heard herself saying. “There’s nobody else but me, is there? If I could do anything for you at all, I would do it. You don’t deserve this fate. You should be loved, surrounded by living people, not by this empty death. It’s not fair. You shouldn’t have to suffer this way.”

The woman in the mirror stared at her, eyes widening in shock, face slackening as she heard. Samantha looked her deliberately in the eyes, projecting love, strength, faith and understanding as strongly as she could. Her heart melted, opened, and softly ached with empathy for the woman in the mirror, a pain so different to the hard, wrenching agony of a few moments ago.

“I’m here for you, my precious darling,” she said, meaning every word. “I’m here for you, and I always will be. I will never leave you or abandon you. I am here for the long haul. There’s to be no bathtub full of blood for you, and no medicating into oblivion either. We’ll get through this together, even if it’s just you and me. It’ll take time, but we’ll recover. I know we will.”

She spoke with firm, quiet authority, while the woman in the mirror sobbed gratefully, her hands touching Sam’s where they rested on the mirror. For a moment she imagined their soft palms meeting, flesh pressing.

She would get through. She would survive.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 2:02 pm and is filed under stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.