I decided to enter a short story competition, and wrote the following 1,500 word story. I'm quite proud of it. It contains much autobiographical stuff from my own life - the death of my mother, my mental health struggles with depression, and the warring of my inner light and inner darkness...
The rest of it is, of course, pure fiction...
The only stipulation other than the length of the short story was that it had to incorporate light as a major or minor theme...
I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it... hugs and happy vibes beaming to you all...
This Beating Heart
Rachel couldn't help him now. Neither could Jim. The grief of their passing was like a giant fist, crushing Andrew's heart. Losing one parent was bad enough, but losing both, especially within such a short space of time, was devastating. No words could describe the emotions that Andrew felt in the weeks following their deaths. Even worse, no sense could be made of the emotionless state that followed.
Rachel's slow gasping descent towards death through pulmonary fibrosis was at first barely noticed. Having been a heavy smoker for all of her adult life, of course it was expected that she would be short of breath and plagued with an annoying dry cough. The first sign that something was not quite right was her sudden unexplained weight loss.
A trip to the doctor was followed by chest X-Rays, which showed nothing untoward. She was sent home with a gentle warning from her doctor to cut down on the cigarettes.
For years, Rachel's smoking had been a battleground. Despite being a loving husband in so very many ways, Jim could never accept it. A former smoker himself, he was never able to reconcile how easy it had been for him to quit all those years ago with how impossible it was for Rachel to quit. He came to see her as weak, and pestered her constantly to quit smoking.
Andrew's childhood memories of arguments, followed by days of cold stony silence, gave way to memories of his adult years. Often, he would be caught in the middle of the battle, as one or the other parent tried to get him to help them fight a war in which there were no winners. Being an only child, Andrew copped the full brunt of their bickering.
"Won't you help her to see the light?" Jim would ask as he watched Rachel light another cigarette.
For many years, Andrew had tried reasoning with his father. It didn't take a genius to see that the stress and emotional turmoil only drove his mother to smoke even more. But Jim persisted, even to the very end.
A chest infection was the beginning of a rapid decline for Rachel. She was hospitalised, and within days a difficult conversation was had with an Intensive Care Unit doctor.
"I'm sorry sir, all hope is lost. Your mother has pulmonary fibrosis. The scarring in her lungs is advanced and irreversible. She will never be able to breathe unassisted again."
Jim turned to Rachel with tears in his eyes, and uttered words that should never have been spoken. "I told you so" never hurt so much.
For what seemed an eternity, Jim and Andrew kept a bedside vigil as the green and red lights, lines and numbers on the monitors measured the waning of her life. Andrew held his mother's withered hand, counting down the hours in series of three gasps followed by fifteen second pauses, until the light of life finally left her eyes.
The funeral passed in a daze. Devastated, Andrew retreated from the world, hiding away in the darkest shadows of his bedroom. Nine days later, an insistent knocking at his front door finally roused him.
Opening the door, Andrew was confronted by a policeman with his hat in his hands.
"Andrew?"
"Yes?" Andrew answered darkly, hollowly, automatically.
The policeman hesitated, appeared uncomfortable.
"What is it?" Andrew asked.
"I don't know how to say this, sir…" the policeman began.
"Then just say it," Andrew replied.
"Your father… we were called in to conduct a welfare check at his house. I am sorry to inform you, but your father is deceased. He committed suicide. There is a note…"
The rest of the policeman's words were lost in the deep fog that enveloped Andrew's mind. Unable to deal with the devastating news of his father's suicide so close to the death of his mother, Andrew descended into a profound darkness.
Driven by despair into a deep depression for months on end, Andrew finally booked himself into a mental health facility. This was perhaps the sanest thing he could have done. Insistent thoughts of suicide had been nagging at him for weeks, building from an occasional thought about ending his pain to a raw compulsion that took his breath away with its power.
Encouraged by the psych ward therapist to use writing as a form of therapy, Andrew started to write poetry. He found that it provided a way for him to express the thoughts and feelings that he had previously been unable to address or understand.
Sitting in the warming light of the morning sun about a week after he had been admitted, the first hints of a calming peace started to grow within Andrew's heart. His latest poem, an expression of the darkness that had taken control of his life, had flowed out of him and taken only twenty minutes to write. In its wake, he felt a natural sleepiness rather than the listless exhaustion he had felt for months now.
Sleep, nature's balm, soothed the emotional stresses away for a time, finally starting the healing process. The piece of paper, filled with barely legible scrawls by his own hand, fell unnoticed to the floor. An errant breeze wafted the poem along the verandah, coming to rest by the feet of a woman sitting quietly by herself some twenty metres away.
Looking down with vague interest, the woman bent down to pick the paper up. Starting to read, an expression of sympathy and understanding sculpted her face.
And So I Am Become Darkness
The dark night consumes me with its unfeeling blackness,
Incapable of caring or even knowing I exist within its infinite reach;
Hope, that warm light that I once could turn my face towards,
Is for naïve fools and restless fanatics, neither of which is me;
And so I am become darkness.
Love, that crazy dream, that half-lucid reverie of madness,
Once called to me, promising a bridge to cross the breach,
With its boiling of the blood and its tantalizing rewards,
Only to turn its back on me, a slave who once was free;
And so I am become darkness.
There is no space more cavernous, nor place that is more cold,
Than that which for so long was bathed with golden light,
Only to be plunged into a startling, deathly gloom,
All the more real and palpable for having known its opposite;
And so I am become darkness.
I once was drawn to believe that fortune favours the bold,
But that is a hard ideal to cling to, surrounded by uncaring night;
With sight's sense gone, I listen for my heart's boom,
Only to confront a numbing silence inapposite;
And so I am become darkness.
What once I turned to for comfort, is now emptiness and lies,
There is not enough stuff in this world to fill the gaping void,
And thought is but a reminder that emotions cut so deep,
And emotions are but a reminder that thought is of no aid;
And so I am become darkness.
With love being the seed of life, what's left when it dies,
And with the fields struck fallow, of growth and hope devoid,
What is there left to do? Oh cruel harvest, now it's time to reap,
With light but a memory, given now to fade;
And so I am become darkness.
With tears in her eyes, the woman rose and walked over to where Andrew was quietly snoring. Deciding to wake him, she gently touched his shoulder. Rousing, he looked up with sleepy eyes.
"Hello," the woman said. "My name is Lumina." She punctuated her name with a radiant smile.
For the first time in months, Andrew felt himself smile. "Hello Lumina, my name is Andrew."
Lumina's eyes beamed loving compassion. "It gets better you know, Andrew. In the absence of light, darkness knows no bounds. You just have to let the light back in. When you are one with the darkness, you don't think that anything else exists, but it does."
Andrew's heart skipped a beat. "How do you…" he started.
Lumina held up the piece of paper that the chance breeze had blown her way. "The problem is not the emptiness inside. The problem is what we do to try and fill it. The choice is ours. We can fill ourselves with darkness or fill ourselves with light, or we can be real people and fill ourselves with a bit of both."
Andrew's smile widened. With the light of life once more starting to shine from his eyes, he asked Lumina if she had eaten breakfast yet.
"No, I haven't," she replied.
"Would you care to join me?"
"Sure," Lumina answered warmly.
Together they walked to the dining room, treading more lightly than they both had in months.
"How do you take your eggs?" asked Andrew.
With another smile, Lumina replied, "Sunny side up, of course."
Andrew laughed, a warm and beautiful sound, thinking "This beating heart still has life and love to share."
