Vide Cor Meum.

Posted by Pointman on June 9, 2017 · 9 Comments 

KD loves RM. She’s written that on her cloth pencil case as a schoolgirl, but carefully hidden away amongst the incredibly detailed forest of enigmatic doodles that covered it entirely. At school, she’d watch him quietly from a few desks back as the teacher droned on about something or other and she’d find and touch unerringly with her fingertips those secret words.

In a subtle way, she’d offered herself to him on a couple of occasions, but she could see he hadn’t really noticed, and she’d made light of the hurt. Boys were so stupid.

He wasn’t a huge draw for the other girls, but for her there was always something about him. Through the school years, one or two of them would trip over him by accident and slowly begin to look at him afresh and for the first time. She watched them from afar and grudgingly awarded the bitches points out of ten, but she always knew he was going to be hers in the end.

It never came about, though they’d remain friends for life.

They both grew up, found their partners, but her lingering affection for him always remained an unfulfilled but nostalgic fantasy safely buried somewhere deep in the what might have been possibilities of her girlhood. She found a good man she loved and they raised their children to adulthood. From a distance, she saw him doing the same. A good husband, a steady provider and a loving father to his children. She was always proud of him.

The world turns and the years pass all too quickly. She and her man parted over some tired and irreconcilable stuff which despite their best efforts they just simply couldn’t get past. It was painful for them both.

He lost his wife to a cancer that against all hope gnawed away at her mercilessly for a couple of years. It was a hard death.

In the aftermath, he did the decent thing and kept on walking around the place for the children’s sake but she could see his heart really wasn’t in it. She didn’t dare come near him in that time; nobody could. It broke her heart to see him in that state, but he eventually came back from it after a few years. A ghost of his old smile started to return. She loved him all the more for it.

She considered briefly the idea of them finally getting together, but she realised that window of opportunity had for so many reasons closed for both of them a long time ago.

In the village hall she happened to be looking in his direction and saw the big heart attack hammer land on him, the look of surprise on his face, the crash as he dropped like a marionette with the strings suddenly snipped by a God above and heard his head hit the wooden floor with an awful thud. She got to him first and held his head in her lap on the polished floor as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. He was still conscious.

‘Hold me Katie, hold me’ he asked with a little bit of scared in his voice and she did, his head fiercely clutched to her breast by one hand and her other arm tightly wrapped around his chest, rocking him back and forth, back and forth and holding on to him dearly, all the way down into the final well of darkness at the end of the world.

She kissed his forehead.

©Pointman

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