Wake Up, For Us

~7~

Your tiny child grows weaker and weaker, and one day grows too weak.

You grieve with your family for days, which turn to weeks, months and then years.

Yet, a tiny doubt lingers in the back of your mind.

Is this real? You ask yourself, almost daily.

Yes, you decide. It must be.

Sam never recovers, not fully. The cheerful and sensitive attitude, the one you fell in love with, has dulled as the open wounds in that streaked a heart so compassionate healed, into tough scar tissue.

Your child, and now your only child, grows older, the memory of a sibling becoming a distant dream.

One day, you think back, whilst gazing at a dreaded sign, to where it all began, almost thirty years ago now.

You were heart broken, you remember. You had walked home in the rain, crying with every step. You crossed the road at your usual place, a quiet road filled with elderly people who rarely drive or have visitors. It had been so long since you saw a car down there that you didn't bother to look.

You turned your head as you stepped down from the pavement and onto the road below. A light shone at you, and caught, as a deer in head lamps, you remember you froze.

With a heart shattered into a million pieces, and tears mingled with rain streaking your face, you were in two minds about your own intentions, unclear on your thoughts when you stepped into the path of a car.

There, your memory was hazy, shocked at your own actions, you raised a hand in apology to the stopped driver, and hurried home to cry into your mother's arms.

Or did you?

You remember from that point on as clear as day, in fact it felt like mere minutes had passed since that moment.

You read an article once about how time passes much faster in the world of dreams, and a small part of you remembers the sound of screams.