| ‘Who are you?’ I want to ask... Another rainy day...Lilia sighed, knowing Mother would force her to stay indoors. Her eyes burned with disappointment. Just because she was born sick and weak, terminal heart disease, a cripple...Parents constantly hovering, always too, too careful. Only Kari was "safe" enough to play with. Only a beat-up little rag doll could be her friend. So young, but already so bitter with broken promises. Well, she wouldn’t let it stop her today. Fed up with waiting and longing, Lilia was finally going to seek out those forbidden pleasures herself, as simple as playing in the rain. She opened the front door, and slipped out to greet the weeping sky. ‘Why are you sitting there, all alone?’ I want to know... At last, freedom! No one to tell her to walk slowly, she could run and skip, whatever she wanted, impulse like the changing wind. She always thought rain was sorrow, cold and wet, a paragon of misery. How could it be! This had to be bliss, raindrops hitting her skin, icy and stinging, each point of contact intensified, magnified, sensation seeping into her sleeping soul. This is what it feels like, being awake and alive. Maybe, just maybe these were tears of happiness. "Little doll, where is your human companion?" Scattered candles, some lit, some not. A moment of carelessness, Lilia scrambled over the low brick wall that she had been told she must never cross alone. Brakes screamed in futility, a warning, a lament. Too late, it was raining and the asphalt was slippery. A dull thud, and then the crunch of metal hitting brick, all over in less than a minute. But the cry of a mother for a lost child would echo on in silence. On the pavement a few feet away (infinity away) lay Lilia, forgotten in the torrent of rain and grief. The sky had one more sad story to cry for today. Months later (too short and too long), here you are, little doll. Here you sit, keeping a lonely vigil, loneliest of them all. Her parents have each other, can find solace in one another. But you, you lost your only friend, and now you have no one. Perhaps the fate you avoided was more terrible than this one. You won’t know the pain of being abandoned, slowly forgotten, a casualty of time as your only friend grows up, grows away, grows apart... So sit there on your wall. A sign, a reminder to all who pass by that life is unpredictable. A light not swallowed by time, never knowing what sad heart might take a piece of your story with him. |
