The Phychiatrist

Sixteen years...

It had been that long.

Looking in the mirror, he saw the same young man he had once been. He had been handsome once. Grey was a colour he hadn't dreamed of, and now it peppered his hair. He couldn't place the exact time he had first noticed it, but it was there. His eyes had once been alive, beaming, and now, they were lined with wrinkles, as he realised just how cruel time really was.

Caledon Hockley was forty-five years old. Not old by any means, but he knew that his life was littered with loss and misfortune that almost made him wish he was no longer on this earth. Piece by piece, parts of him had become stripped away, worn down, and taken from him beyond his fate and fortune. Beyond his control. Control was the one thing he needed to be in his hands at all times.

In the gold-framed mirror, he was faced with his reflection. His hair was styled wonderfully, his suit pressed, and outwardly, he was a man of outstanding character. He had a loving wife and a marriage that had lasted fourteen years, creating a picture-perfect family: a daughter and two sons. Each of them stood tall, beautiful, and proud of their family. He should have been proud of them and his achievements, but he wasn't. Inwardly, he had fought a battle since 1912. Something that had started small, a cruel loss, but something he had been young enough to get over, but he never had.

His ex-fiancée had not only betrayed him in all ways possible; she had run away with a man a decade younger than him, but then, for the best part of fifteen years, he had believed her to be dead. He had spent those years mourning, drinking, descending until a business trip to New York City had taken him to a theatre with a colleague, and there she had been. As bright as the sun. She had married another man...she had children. Four of them. She created beautiful and sparkling little lives, not with Dawson but with another. He had been tanned, tall, and handsome. Caledon Hockley had emptied his stomach numerous times that night and the next morning. Drinking hard liquor for days on end had done nothing to help, and so he had shut himself away in hotel room after hotel room, just thinking and letting everything which had built up over the last sixteen years teem out of every pore.

She had lived...

And yet, he had mourned her.

He had mourned the death of a woman who was alive all along.

His hands were shaking. His lips were dry. His stomach twisted and turned, but that wasn't a new feeling. His cheeks were hollow, and he struggled to remember the last time he had eaten a good meal. Food wasn't the current nourishment of his choice. A low grumble reminded him that he must eat something today, even if it didn't remain in his stomach. The shakes had started from the withdrawals of the whiskey, but he promised himself that if he were going to do this, then he would at least do it sober. He drank to numb the pain, to suppress every emotion he had kept bottled up for so long. The drink helped him to pass out into a pitiful sleep, plagued with nightmares, not of a sinking ship with hundreds of people plunging to their deaths, but of the woman who had left him hanging out to dry all those years ago.

You're a foolish mess. He wished to shout, but no words said aloud would change the internal war he fought with himself every day. His breathing was shallow. This was the moment of truth, the one thing he said he would never do. He half wanted to laugh at his stupidity, but that wouldn't change anything.

He had been given the chance years ago to love her, to want her, to possess every inch of her, and yet he had never quite been the husband of choice. He had wanted her body and soul, and he never once got the chance. At first, she had loved him; she had said as much, but he knew that his behaviour afterwards had become suppressing and challenging, and she had found love elsewhere.