Night of Ice

In the quiet and stillness of a winter night I sat. I could feel the crinkle of the wind against the house, though it was shut out. It seemed that the house was as delicate as an eggshell, coated in a thin layer of ice, and it could crumble with too much movement from within and too much wind from without. I held my breath and tiptoed as if I could keep the house standing by my near immobility.

Although the blinds were drawn, I thought with a shiver of what I was shutting out. The snow encrusting the earth was like a china dish: glossy, smooth, and fragile. To set foot on it's delicate crust was to fear a crack in it's surface, and a crack would shatter the earth. So I sat still and quiet, fearful of the outside.

I listened carefully to the silences, hoping only for the sound of your footfall on the delicate earth outside. I needed you there, I needed you home, because I missed you. It was as if I hadn't lived since I last saw you, though you had just been there with me that morning, warming me with the sweetness of your smile and the tenderness of your loving arms.

The silence invaded my soul and brought a cold darkness over me, from the inside out. I felt so desperately alone and yet I could not remember why. I could hear the patter of soft feet inside the walls and the beat of bat-wings above my head. White spots formed before my eyes like the foreshadowing of mini strokes that would leave me trembling in paralytic immobility. I listened for you, awaiting your arrival at any moment. The opening of a heavy door, the crack of a frosted hinge, and warmth would be restored to my frozen heart. I pressed my forehead against the floor, my palms and tingling fingers groped to balance my reeling mind.

I sat thus for the longest time, until the gentle tick...tick...tick of the chime clock on the wall became drumbeats in my ears. My mind went dark against the pounding waves of sound, like a rock smashed time and again by the beating of the surf: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh...until erosion has rubbed the rock into nothing it once was.

CRACK.

I startled awake from a sleepless stupor, lying in a pool of saltwater on the floor, the sobs I had been gushing forth were still wracking against my ribs like a clamoring beast struggling to get out of me.

CRACK.

I shivered uncontrollably and huddled into the corner of the room alone, my feet slipping on my own tears as I crawled away from the windows in fear. The earth was like a piece of glass, shattering around me because someone, somewhere, had cracked its surface. I grasped the slippery floor and reached into the darkness around me, but nothing was there to hold on to. The sobs beat inside my body until I couldn't hold them and they controlled me. Where were you? If only you'd come; if only you were here to hold on to now.

The white spots before my eyes grew brighter until they were long white lines of piercing light. The walls and floors of the house were crumbing into giant cracks and I would fall through into the depths of the earth. I sobbed, incoherent, begging the earth to swallow me, wanting to be taken.

Without you there was nothing, and I willed myself forward, through the pool of my own tears, toward the precipice where I could throw myself over the edge.

In a sudden moment of clarity before the end, I remembered why you would never come. I remembered that you were dead.

***

When I awoke, it was morning, and a pool of sunlight illuminated me as I lay in a heap of aching sadness on the hardwood floor of our home. I had survived the first night of the rest of my empty, lonely life...