As I Lay Dying

Twenty eight

1918

Evelyn

It's a small glass bottle. A tiny, delicate cork-stoppered bottle with 20 innocuous blue pills rattling around inside.

Would that be enough?

I stare down it it in my hand, watching as the sunlight catches the glass before placing it shakily on the bedside cabinet.

It's strange, the thing I fear most is physical pain. Once I would have sworn it was sadness, loss, loneliness. But not now.

Emotional pain, scars you carry within, have become part of my life. The very worst things I could ever have imagined have happened to me already. I don't live anymore, I exist. Clawing through one day to the next.

Physical pain, the sheer brutality I saw in the trenches, how men screamed in agony from their wounds... That's the only thing left for me to fear.

I glance again at the bottle.

I won't do it.

I can't because of the smallest, tiniest, shred of hope that lives within me. I have nothing, nothing at all to hope for... But it's still there. It's the human curse, hope, the sweetest lie.

Harry and Adeline are dead and I've lived through hell. Every single day I get dragged further into the black abyss with only pain and grief for company. But I don't stop trying to survive. I don't know why. It feels like my life is a long, dark path with horrors lurking at every corner, but some strange wind is pushing at my back, forcing me to place one unwilling foot in front of another and continue walking.

I'm lost in despair, in soul-tearing grief... But somehow I keep going. Somewhere deep within me there is hope, a tiny sapling that dwells within me and refuses to be smothered, despite the fact I refuse to nurture it.

The July heat hangs heavy over the estate. It's been a long hazy summer, the kind that Harry and I used to live for.

I can see his small cottage from my window. The hydrangeas he so lovingly tended are in full bloom on the twisting path outside, he always spent long hours after a hard days work tending his garden.

His favourites were the little wild flowers that grow en masse wherever they please and took over his flower bed. When I told him that they were mere weeds and he should try and plant something manageable, he laughed and kissed me, saying that wild, unruly things of great beauty were his favourite, didn't I know that already?

My eyes travel to his bedroom window. This side of the house shaded and it can only just make out the lattice of his window.

I remember how every night through our childhood he would place a lantern there. He knew I was afraid of the dark and I would often pull back the sash from my own window and gaze down at the light flickering in his. His way of letting me know through the darkness of the night that he was there, I wasn't alone.

Now there is no light to guide me through this darkness, nor ever will there be again. I am alone, broken and bruised in the darkest night I've ever faced with no sunrise on the horizon.

I wipe my eyes and glance back at the cottage.

My heart stills it's beat.

A small light flickers steadily from Harry's window.

A trick of the light.

Yet there is no sunlight on this side of the house.

I close my eyes tightly and open them again slowly. It's still there. A small, insistent light flickering as it has done so many times before.