Wait For Me

My prompt at Search Engine Stories this week is –  wait for me

 

This is a  little bit of a bleak story but my muse is in the doldrums.

Hope it’s not too stark…..

 

 

 

 

The chair in the garden remains unmoving in the bad weather, I think it has taken root, certain of your return. The grass grows darker around its legs, softer, as if preparing a cushion for your feet. A single rose has broken from the bush against the stone wall, the same colour as the ruby ring you gave me when we first met, it hangs like a ripe fruit, brushing the back of the chair.

 

The words you left me with, so innocuous when heard individually, have a combined power that can bring me to my knees. To utter them is now a forbidden thing.

 

My senses are different now. Without you they are as fragile as rice paper. Sometimes it hurts to open my eyes.  I imagine traces of you in corners, in shadows. Sometimes the smell of you lingers on sheets washed over a hundred times since you’ve been gone. Sometimes I hear nothing but your absence.

 

At night the garden is colourless. The chair is thrown into relief against the moonlight, blanched as a face in pain. When I can’t sleep I hover by the window, looking out again and again, checking to see if the chair remains empty. A trick of the light, a cloud against the moon, casting indistinguishable figures on the ground, gives me hope that maybe one day I will look out into the garden and see you for real.

 

In the morning the sky blazes into view. I imagine footsteps, a knock at the door, that the endlessness will shift, that something will come next. But the last words you uttered enfold me like a curse.

 

Wait for me.

I will return.

My faith in the power of the words is waning. My heart.

It has been more than twenty years.

When will you come?