/yesod

Tag: sadness

  • a sad girl

    …lying in bed this morning, I woke to the sound of the bedroom door opening.

    I hear my wife slowly close the door behind her. I hear her footsteps on the floorboards, approaching my side of the bed.

    I cannot move, cannot open my eyes.

    I feel a fingertip on my arm, just inside the hinge of my elbow.

    The footsteps move away. I struggle to rise, to grasp the her arm but my hand feels strange, tingling in the air where I reach for her, a moment’s resistance . . . then the woman pulls away and walks into a little alcove on the other side of the room.

    The woman is gone. It was not my wife. It was someone else, someone younger — her hair was longer, darker — and she had long scratches or cuts down her arms. And she was sad.

    I cannot confidently say whether or not this was a dream.

  • brief reunion

    …we sit together in the small living room, balancing plates on our knees and doing our best to keep up the conversation despite the fact that there are some genuinely difficult conflicts unresolved between a few of us. And the fact that some of us are dead.

    It’s a surprise to see them, my grandparents. Odder still is the appearance of multiple versions of my grandfather — he sits with my grandmother, each of them in their late fifties, full of good humor and health . . . and he sits next to me in his early nineties, broken and cadaverous, his eyes pits of sorrow.

    My mother is there . . . but there is something odd about her. I can’t quite tell what it is and I don’t understand why no one else seems to notice or care…

    …and when I wake, I wonder what it means . . . wonder if a call will come today with bad news.