La Douleur Exquise

Forgotten Soup

I like slicing onions. That’s what I am thinking while slicing onions to go with the soup I’m cooking. I think the best part about slicing an onion is the fact that it will make you cry, and that’s nice. Because even if you don’t want to, your eyes sting and suddenly tears starts dripping off your chin. It gives me the feeling that you can cry about anything. I’m not fond of crying to be honest, but slicing onions give you the freedom to like or unlike it without having to have a profound, tear-jerking reason. It’s like life is telling you that you can just cry, because you want to, not because you’re sad. It’s a weird kind of hope.

            But that’s just how I look at it and I do, admit my weirdness.

            My phone rings, stopping my train of thought for awhile. I also stop from dicing the onions as talking to the phone and doing that is dangerous for my fingers.

            “Hello, this is Samantha, How can I help you?” I ask, sniffing. My eyes are already watery.

            “This is Uncle Rob, Sam,” the other line says in this baritone that is unmistakably male. Uncle Rob is my mother’s brother.

            “Yeah, uh, hi Rob. What’s up?”

            “I can’t explain it here, Sam. It’s your mom. I suggest you better go to the hospital as soon as you can,” his voice is barely a whisper and the sheer sadness in it literally halted all movements from me. Even my internal organs seem to have abandoned all its functions.

            The thing about having to go to the hospital is that you have to visit some really sick person, or an accident survivor, or a dead one.

            It takes me a minute before I am able to get back to my senses, “What happened?” I turn the stove off and quickly lock the doors. I curse when I remember that I don’t have the car keys. In my frustration, I smash the door with my fist.

            But I wasn’t that strong so it didn’t even make a dent. I fumble around for the house keys and thankfully found it before I had another urge to just punch the window. Quickly grabbing my purse, I dart outside and head for my car.

            My heart is thumping really hard and loud, my mind reeling of the endless possibilities of whatever happened. Worry plagued my heart and soul that I’m having trouble breathing. At this moment, I think that if someone will push me, I’ll fall apart like a house of sticks.

            “Can you repeat that?” I ask uncle Rob again. I am not exactly in the right state of mind, so I didn’t pay attention to what he was saying. I am driving at the highest speed without having to deal with the police. Seconds later, my brain registers that the other line is already dead. Or I must have turned it off. I’m not sure, what I’m sure of is that these tears aren’t from the onions anymore.

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Fifteen minutes. It took that long to finally get to the hospital. Aunt Violet, Uncle Rob’s wife, is at the entrance, waiting for me. Her eyes are bloodshot, and that didn’t help my growing anxiety at all. She quietly leads me to the lobby, where Uncle Rob is staring blankly at the wall.

“What happened?”

“Witnesses said she was crossing the street, when a drunk driver…run over her. They’re still in pursuit of the car,” he answers miserably.

“Where is she?” I ask, strangely calm, although my insides are staging some kind of a civil war. My muscles felt like jelly, so I had to sit at the nearest bench.