Changing Tides

Eternity

A soft knock on the door roused me from my sleep, my arms feeling light at the missing body. I could hear soft banging in the adjoining room, quiet giggles as my daughter entertained herself in my absence.

I checked the time on my device and realised that we had missed lunch and had a few minutes until dinner. Slowly climbing from the bed, I wiped my face and then made my way to the door.

Carson stood there, his broad shoulders filling up the door frame as he looked at me and then over my shoulder. His eyes darkening as a sadness entered his eyes.

"I'm going to sing a little song I made for you," the holographic image of Meilan reappearing unexpectedly.

I staggered back into the room. A cold shiver climbing through my body as my eyes became cloudy, sweat beading along my brow. 

I looked erratic but I couldn't bare to see this memory of us. I couldn't hear this song not on this day. Perhaps not ever.

My skin was clammy as I ripped at the bed sheets and stormed around the room looking for the comms device. Tears dripping down my face and body shaking as the sounds of my laughter filed the room. We had been so happy.

Wiping at the tears on my face I continued looking for it, hoping that I could switch the hologram off before it got to the part that I new would desecrate me. It was one memory that I could never relive.

"What song will you sing?"

The playback of me was not real, it couldn't be real because that laugh, that laugh was foreign to me. There was no sing song chirpy tone to my laughter. Not any more.

My laughter was a muted ring, a dull sound that rarely crescendoed into anything as beautiful as the joy inflicted in this version of me.

The hologram played back like an alternative universe. A woman and man in love with nothing but the future ahead of them.

It was a story of the ages, one you told your children about and I suppose that in time it would be just that. A tale of love but in moments like this and on a day like today, I couldn't think to the future because I was stuck.

Stuck in the past because I couldn't let him go, I didn't want to.

The hologram was still playing and was seconds away from reaching that moment that would send my life into a talespin and rip apart the small pieces of myself I had begun to fix.

I couldn't find it.

The room was spinning as the sound of the guitar picked up and his voice began to croon through. My heart thudding out of my chest and breath struggling through my lips because soon he would start promising me the world in his melodic voice and I would be forced to hear it all.

I couldn't hear it.

The world fell away from me, black climbing through the fringes of my mind as I rocked myself sane.

I couldn't hear the music anymore, not over the sobbing. Gut wrenching sounds, I could feel the despair. Words were chanting from my lips as I tried to ease the pain. Tried to take the grief from my heart but it clung to my soul like a parasite, draining my essence from me one painful memory at a time.