The Periods of Being

Chapter V

Chapter V

    Her bedroom is too dark and too quiet. The perfect recipe for her thoughts to wander without any end. The open curtains bring in little moonlight and starlight to help rush away the demons, but the demos in her mind aren't depression nor sorrow, but grief and shame for the time she wasted when she could've been creating memories with her husband. All the times where she could've done so rush into her mind like a sympathy of crows, screeching loudly in the cage of her ribs, making it difficult to take in deep breathes like Mark's ghost tries to tell her to do so.

    "Do you want to go out to the garden to see what the gardener planted? I heard he rescued the rose bushes and that they are prospering now." He was shadowing her as he stood beside where she was sitting in their library, her nose in a book. The same book that she deemed to be her favorite until today when she realized all the times she was reading it instead of living.

    She didn't even lift her eyes away from the page. She just waved her hand at him then flipped a page.

    "Maybe later, I haven't been feeling well today." Wasn't a lie, but it was an excuse, she monologues. He held up his hand to her forehead to make believe that he was checking her temperature.

     "Looks like you have come down with a case of Cabin Fever." He wiggled his fingers over her eyes to try to get her to look up at him, but she refused to budge. "The only cure is to go outside with your handsome husband and see the rose bushes." He chuckled to himself, thinking he was all clever with his joke. She tried to hide a smirk, but she failed.

     "Mark, I really am not feeling too well," She dog-eared the page she was on and closed the book slightly to look up at him. His eyes sparkled as hers linked onto his. "You can go see them and come back and tell me all about it in great detail."

    I'm a fool, she calls out in her mind to divert the memory away. She can't bear to watch his face fall again and him grabbing a book from one of the shelves in the library and sit with her. He didn't go outside because he wished to see the roses with her. So, instead, he read with her. Again, she didn't deserve him. He deserved someone that would've gone out to the garden with him. He deserved that.

     She turns over in bed to try to get comfortable, but without him next to her and without the hope of him arriving home alive rather than ready for a burial, she can't find comfort. The bed turns into a death trap. The duvet is heavy on her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. The pillows are rocks beneath her head and give her a headache. Her nightgown tangles around her legs and she wishes to get out of its clutches, even if that meant she would need to strip down to her underwear.

    She is trapped. Her mind is trapped with memories and misery while she is trapped physically in the bed. She can cry out for help, for someone to come and tell her she is crazy and should go to sleep, but all she can do is cry out for herself and for her husband to be revived in some way. The only ounce of hope she can allow herself to hold onto is that the telegram is a mistake. He is alive in some God blessed way.

    Her heart rejoices at the hope, but her mind knows not to hold onto it too closely.

    A funeral will happen; this much she knows. She'll have to go back to Garthen Manor to have him buried there: at home. She breaks inside and tears coat her face along with snot as she imagines how the funeral will play out. She once was thinking the same about their wedding a long time ago. She never imagined for herself then to have to be imagining what her husband's funeral would be like.

    She cries out again in a sob at the thought of it all. She holds a hand to her mouth to try to silence herself, and when she finds it to be hard, she bites down on her duvet to keep her sobs inside of her. She tries to calm herself down, but each thought of wearing the mourning veil again but in a graveyard and putting flowers down on Mark's casket makes her break out louder and louder.