Five Words of Sympathy

By: Ramsha Ekhlaque 


A sense of anguish, more so than pain, had taken rule of heart and she felt extremely light headed. Maybe the upper content of her head was a little more lighter than a spiral of wool, which was slowly turning as it unravelled. One more revolution and the final strand would release to allow her mind to slip through the gap, and float slowly up and away. Now she was drifting, drifting, drifting down through a bed of gently swaying seaweeds.

The day was damp and bleak, and a grey mist hung over the lake like a veil. The only sound to break the eerie silence was the slow methodical beat of its wings, as a lone grey heron passes lazily and unseen, overhead.

Fragments of thought, splinters of words and droplets of silence spun into a kaleidoscopic jumble, shifting infinitesimally and fell into an incredible new pattern.

All at once, she discovers that there is nothing around at all but a spreading carpet of grey-green moss, year's deep, and a silence that feels as old as time itself. There is nothing to frighten her, but she is frightened and lone-some, not so much for people, but a sound, any sound. She turns to run back towards town, but there is nothing behind her now. For a second, she stood under a grey moss, under a grey sky, in the midst of a grey silence.

The emptiness in her heart, the numbness pounding her brain, the salty tears that flowed unchecked from her eyes, the shear nothingness that now took hold of her soul threatened to engulf her entirely. Her legs buckled, knees sinking into the sodden earth as she watched her own casket being lowered to its final resting place.

She opened her eyes to find herself in a land of deepest shade. It was a weary region of dead, where all things are forgot. Dark as the empty heart of an abandoned soul, dark as the unlit corner of a bedroom closet, dark as a clogged drain, dark as a murderer's soul, dark as a dead man's memories.

Her head swam in the fire burning inside, the only smouldering embers of a time where there had been other presences with her, around her, in her. But now, the void had been slowly filled with a cold, howling storm of fear that refused to ever let up. She was completely and utterly alone in her mind, body, soul and all the loneliness could offer her were five words of sympathy and two droplets of tears.