Dawning

A story I wrote when I woke up from enlightening/bad dream, I don't know. It was about a month or two ago. The theme is "What you will miss".

 

The morbid chapel had no light from candles or other man made lights. Its only light was through the blank stain glass windows and even then, the light outside the cold gloomy atmosphere was dim. There was silence and the world seemed to stop. Two alters, not one stood at the front of the disheartening chapel.

 

We should’ve had a funeral…for the three. My aunts stood at the side, crying tears of utter despair for their two lost dogs. Monica and Toby. Grandma and grandpa sat in a pew, watching the scene from a distance with silent tears in their old eyes. Lola sat in the front aisle, crying over the mysterious third. In my heart, I knew the person, in my heart, I knew there was a third, but I couldn’t figure it out. Also with us was a doctor, inspecting our lost dogs. It hurt to see him look over their small corpses and identify the problems with them.

 

More than a few times, my family talked with the doctor as if it was possible to bring them back to life. Toby needed a surgery, a surgery that he had gone through once before in his long life. Maybe it was better to let our old dog die in peace. He needed rest. On the other hand, Monica was in her prime as people would say and the doctor said that when she died…she was pregnant. Lying lifeless and gone, we can’t save my beloved little companion, but we could save her remaining pup, the survivor of the dead lot. We could save the pup.

 

It’s so hard, watching that man cut up my precious former companion with a knife and reach into her. Monica was my only true dog, my best friend. She followed me and never left my side. If I was missing, she’d cry as if she cried for Toby. When I had gone through a state of depression, or when my aunt had ignored me and I felt lost and rejected, she let me hug her and cry into her soft fur until I felt better. Always there. So innocent and mischievous, she was a devilish little troublemaker, but still, she was my devilish little troublemaker…I’ll miss you, Monica.

 

With as much courage as I could muster for my fallen friend, I walked over and stood behind the doctor just as he pulls out Monica’s last pup. When he finally brings it to the world of sad stilled light, the pup is the only sign of true life in this mournful chapel. The doctor asks who will hold him after he has cleaned him. His question is answered by an outcry from my aunts at what they have lost for this little pup to be born. So the doctor is ignored as he cleans the pup and comes back to the same reaction. On an impulse, seeing me stare at my precious dog with an unfaltering gaze, he handed the puppy to me, pushing the little black thing into my hands. Almost instantly, I responded to the movement of the pup and stared down at him. That’s when my tears flowed more smoothly and I saw the beauty, future strength, and future joy this little pup will bring. He will be as wonderful as his mother…maybe even better.

 

All of a sudden, as I’m caressing the new pup, my aunt asks if they should adopt me now. Everything I was feeling, the pup in my hands and the ground beneath my feet and the last heat that keeps the line between cold and self-provided warmth, disappear. The last one, the one my Lola was crying for, was my mother. I didn’t want to believe it, but in the dark shaken depths of my heart, I knew it to be true. My mother was dead.

Just then, my mother comes down the center aisle, but there’s something different about her. She’s acting as she once had before father died, happy yet silent. There was an inner light, an inner-warmth about her from even back then, yet now it seems to be fading. Fading. My mother was dead and her warmth was fading from my reach. I couldn’t bear it. First, I lose the dog I grew up with, then I lose my trusted companion, and now…I’m losing the person who holds the biggest space in my heart with no such thing as hate to surround their memory.

 

My tears falling as rivers, I rush to my mother and her calm smile, hoping for the safety and comfort of her warm embrace. To my despair, it brings none of that. The one I’m holding is the image of my mother before she had me and my brother, even though she is still the same woman as when she died, only now she had father and that has reverted her back to how she was nine years ago. I cry harder. She tells me that it’s fine, that’s she’s okay, but she’s not, she’s dead…and she’s leaving me. Then, it hits me like a rock, how she died. I remember now, in my memory, in a forgotten patch of grass behind two metal doors bound in chains and locked together. Mother died in a car accident, in a car that I should’ve been with her in. She shouldn’t have died alone. I should’ve gone with her! She shouldn’t have to leave me!!

 

At that moment, I wanted to die too and join my mother in death. I didn’t want her to leave me. I wanted her to stay beside me. Sensing my desire to die, my mother consoled me, her words reaching me slowly and painfully. She told me of how life will be now, how I should cherish the little family I have left, how I should move on from here, and how I should hold onto my memories and cherish them. It hurts. How can I hold onto memories that only make my heart burn and break? No one wants to keep memories like that and now I understand. I understand their pain and how much it kills them, shatters them to shards of broken glass from the inside-out.

 

Trying to obey her, I ask about what will happen to me, what I’ll do…how I’ll get on without her. In response, she answers and tries to console me to the core of my heart. She tells me that she will always be close. I don’t believe her. She says that she’ll always be there. I don’t believe her. She says that if I listen closely, I’ll be able to hear through the barrier that separates us. I don’t believe her. She says that she loves me…and that’s the only thing I believe.

 

As if I was the only one who could see my mom, my aunts say it’s time to adopt me and in my arms, the pup struggles anew. When I turn to my mother behind me, her presence is fading and only my memory fills the blanks. Then I realize, with all the time it takes to merely get out of here, my mother’s spirit would be entirely gone by then. Once that realization hits me, I run away, to the back of the chapel, to a place of isolation, a room that was not normal for a chapel. There is an empty cot in the left corner and a sink by the door. Just as the chapel beyond the door to this dreary room seems so colorless, this room has no life either.

Looking in the mirror, I see myself, but that fact doesn’t sink. Is this really me that I’m looking at? Not believing, I reach out a hand and see tears fall down my cheeks, yet I can’t feel them. My fingertips brush the mirror. I can’t reach her, I can’t console her. For reasons I couldn’t explain, it felt like I was looking at myself from the other side of the mirror, that she was the real me and she was the one experiencing this. She looked so broken, so shattered, but I couldn’t touch her, console her, or wipe her tears away. Not even I could console myself.

 

Then I saw in my reflection, there was something small and black in the crook of my arm. She was crying and hugging it so tightly, the little thing squirmed, but I wasn’t doing that. I look down and watch as the pup moves in my arms. He’s not struggling, but he’s looking at me and trying to move to or for something to see. Watching him, I feel a smile in my heart, a smile that isn’t strong enough to reach my face, only lessen my tears. When I look back in the mirror, the girl that was crying is gone, replaced with a girl without a soul. Her features produced an aura as cold and detached as the surface of stone. No matter how long it seemed that I stared, she didn’t look at me…until this.

 

Suddenly, the quiet moment was slammed to the rocks and I heard my aunt’s voice bring me back to the raging torrent. It’s time to go, and in that instant, she finally looked up. I regret that she did. Her eyes were so empty, so cold that felt something in me try so desperately to hide, to keep from breaking. There was a pressure on my body, on my heart and it was “killing” me. Outside, behind my aunt, I heard my mother coaxing me to come out and go with my aunt. Both of their voices seemed like a whisper at the end of a world silenced by the killer that is time and the gloom of unspoken death. Obediently, I go out of the room and almost follow my aunt out the doors of the large of the chapel, but before I go, I see that my mother isn’t even trying to come with us. I turn back to her and say, “B-Bye mom…I’ll miss you.”

 

She takes me into her fading arms, the former heat of her life slowly ebbing further away as she says, “I know, I know…but I can’t go with you any further. You were right not to believe me.”

 

When her words finally hit me, I pull through her astral arms and take a step back. There are tears in her eyes as I stare back at her with sadness and anger and ask, “What do you mean?”

 

“…Because if I leave, I’ll be leaving this world and you’ll never see me again.”

Before I can respond to her, her image and the entire world around me breaks apart like the shards of a broken mirror. Everything around me disappears and for a moment, I’m consumed in endless, boundless darkness and no matter how much I reach, I can touch nothing…and then I wake up.

 

I see color and bright light streaming in through my curtains. It seemed so strange. In the dream, the world had no color, no life, not a single fair sign of hope. I move around in my bed, but the feel and aftermath of the dream are still bound on me like chains of steel. For a moment, I had thought that I had awoken from the dream of a memory, that my mom was still dead, that I’ll never see her again, that this was the last time I will spend in my house. Then, after that moment of bitter torture, I realize that this is reality and what I had seen was a dream. It was all a dream.

Still, though I know that fact to be true, the aftermath is stuck in the core of my heart, clinging to the walls of rotting and melting despair. To reassure myself, I get out of my bed and walk to the door of my mom’s room, listening to see if she was okay. Her breathing rises and falls steadily, barely heard through the muffled blare of her radio alarm clock. At that instant, I break down and cry. Through my tears, I pray to God and the heavens, not to take her away from me, just like how they took away my Grandpa John, my Grandpa Michael, or my father, or how fate took away…the brother I forgot to love. After a few moments, the prayers still buried in my mind and repeating ever faithfully to the God above us all, I stand up and I walk away, not a tear in my red eyes…anymore. Only a sun too bright to be comforting, rather it’s taunting me sickeningly.

 

Peace be with you, dear child

Author's Note

There's symbolism in this story and some are very subtle that they're hard to distinguish. Watch out for those. They mean a lot to the story.

Reviews

[Autumn]

I can't imagine what might have driven you to write a story such as this one. It evokes so many emotions, and is so abstract, but I caught everything within in. Being the grammar Nazi I would normally be poking around and trying to help you fix that, but the amount of emotions that this beautiful tale envokes is so strong that I feel no need to speak up for something as small as the grammar. Very well put, I love the description and sybolism you've put into this.