Sagas

{19} Dark clouds ~ P

The sun had not shown its face for the past four days. It stayed safely behind the dark clouds while nature wailed, her tears pouring down uncontrollably and her voice of thunder roaring angrily. And when I lay in bed last night and watched her tears continuously drop to the earth, I understood her.

One of her own had been taken away prematurely, and she would soon have to open up herself and receive the shell his spirit dwelt in. If I could have been so shameless as to mourn with her, I would have cried. But I didn't have the right. I didn't even have the permission to shed a tear. Why should I when I was the reason he was gone?

This was why I sat down in the silent room, partially relieved that I couldn't hear the sound of the rain anymore and glad that I was seeing Dr. Joan again, even if I was too tired to say it out loud. I had counted the long days till today, another Thursday when I could get to see a face that didn't have that haunted look that filled the whole school.

I had not said a word since the session started nearly ten minutes ago, not even a greeting when her face popped up on the screen. And when she gave me that understanding look, I knew she had been filled in on the recent happenings. So for the past ten minutes, we'd just watched each other and she watched me with her gentle eyes as I scribbled in my journal, telling me wordlessly that she was there to carry the burdens with me and that I didn't have to carry the heavy load on my shoulders alone, encouraging me to put it down and let her give me a helping hand.

"Are you ready to talk about it now?" She asked quietly.

I didn't look up from my journal but kept on squeezing in words into any little space I could find on the filled-up page.

"You need to speak to talk to me, kiddo. You know that is why I am here-to listen to you."

I turned over to a new page and wrote some words in the middle. I had a lot of things to say, and I had planned to let her in on everything when I walked into this room. To recount how the last six days had been for me. But now that she was on the other side of the screen, I was too tired to speak. I hadn't slept in five nights, and the dark circles around my heavy eyes were prominent, and I knew if she didn't push harder, she wouldn't get a word out of my mouth, and only the journal I was writing in would get to hear the thoughts that were screaming in my head.

She patiently tapped her pen on her notepad, making a thump, thump, thump sound that echoed about the quiet room, and it grew louder and more annoying with every second that passed, forcing my attention to her.

"Why don't you tell me about what you're writing? Can I know the last thing you wrote?"

The one black, untidy word I just wrote down stood out against the white page. I could at least read them out to her. Maybe that would help me start the conversation.

"Var lamoril eranth," I read out.

"And what does it mean?" She asked. I could see the fascination in her eyes, the same way it had been the day she opened the pages of my first journal.

Writing in a journal had been her idea. I wasn't speaking when we first met, not to anyone at least, and when all attempts to get me to talk failed, she gave me an assignment to write in my journal every day, hoping it would help her get into my head. Imagine her surprise when she flipped open the cover page and saw those strange words.

I wrote my journals in the secret language Fabian and I used. How we learned it or got to know it was something I didn't understand, but we spoke this language and wrote it as fluently as we did with English. We communicated with it when we didn't want anyone to understand our conversation. We didn't use it often, but a time came when we were both grateful for knowing it.