I've posted a new... well, actually, an old short story called Shadow Of The Sun on my WordPress blog. It's by no means the best thing I've ever written, and it could use vast amounts of improvements, but I've got a bit of a soft spot for it. So, it's up for anyone who may be interested.
Can't imagine there'd be many...
Just in case there is, though, here's part one of it...
IWhenever I heard the stories about people who'd lost someone close to them, and how it left a big hole in their life they could never seem to fill, I never really gave them a thought. I always put it down to cliché, them filtering their perceptions and feelings through Hollywood films, using a language, a shorthand, that the silver screen had created to make it easier for us to understand and use.
When it happened to me, I realised what you saw in the movies was only the beginning. They left out the parts about the dark underbelly, when your world becomes full of well meaning friends and relatives, who try to understand your loss, but only succeed in making it worse by reminding you of everything that's been taken out of your life. They can never really understand, no matter how hard you try and make them; all those words you give them are never enough. Then the vultures come out and circle, desperate to see what's been left for them, and when they realise there's nothing, their hollow sense of grief suddenly vanishes and shows the anger and bitterness lurking just underneath the surface. People that never even liked you or had no part of your life come forward wearing pathetic masks of false sympathy and say how terrible it must be for you, thinking they can relate, thinking that in telling you this they can pretend they know what you're going through, and then, having dispensed their good words of kindness, done their self-appointed duty, they vanish back into the world never to be seen again.
After I lost Natalie, that became my world.
Day in, day out, I had people call me, stop me in the street, post letters and cards, come round to our flat (I still can't think of it as just my flat), right up to the day of the funeral. Some of them even had the balls to turn up at the church and talk to her family. But after that, I hardly saw any of them again, and when I did, they didn't always acknowledge I was even there, let alone speak to me.
As time passed, I did the only thing I could do, and learned to live without her. I didn't handle it well. I would come through the door from work expecting her to be curled up on the couch with a book and a warm smile for me; I'd climb into bed and try and wrap my arms around her only to be reminded with a sharp slap that she wasn't there any more and never would be again.
Those first few days were the worst; I'd find myself slumped on the floor, too numb to even cry. It felt like I'd taken a few steps forward but left her behind, like I could just turn around and see her strolling along. I contemplated ending everything, but I couldn't for her sake. She'd never have forgiven me.
So, I began to search for something to help me try and live a little more comfortably with that aching hole Natalie had left, something to help me understand...everything, I suppose, that little bit more.
It took almost a month, but I found it.
Natalie had always had an insatiable passion for the subject of dreaming; she was always fascinated with their meanings and purposes, to the point that she kept dream diaries, her own private logs of her travels in her imaginary worlds. I stumbled across them while I was sorting through her belongings, and found myself being drawn into her worlds and their magic. A part of me told me to pack them away with the rest of her things and leave them alone, but I didn't even listen to it. I sat myself down on the living room floor and began to read through them, looking at her handwriting and letting memories wash over me. I read and read until I fell asleep with her words freewheeling through my mind.
Maybe it was the discovery of those books that prompted me that night, fed some silent command into my waiting subconscious to trigger the events that followed. I honestly don't know, and if I had the choice, I don't think I'd want to know.
I found myself walking through the town where I grew up, the place where I had spent the first twenty or so years of my life. I was wandering aimlessly, past the old store fronts and street signs, never seeing or hearing a thing, not another living person, until I suddenly found myself standing outside the old bookshop at the top end of town. I stopped at the door and stared at the building across the street, another bookshop where the old estate agents offices should've been; it was larger than the one I was outside of, seemed to be more like part of a chain. A poster in the huge window of the first floor held my attention for no reason I could pin down: it pictured a woman in a Victorian-style dress, lying face down on a bare wooden floor. An upturned goblet lay next to her, with a trickle of something red running away from it.
It was then that my eyes - my senses - suddenly began to take everything in, like I had suddenly regained control of my body. I turned around to find myself standing in a place both alien and yet achingly familiar to me. I didn't recognise the town at all: it was somewhere...else. Not the place where I had grown up, some other town I had never set foot in before. As I stood staring at the mixture of modern brick and old stone buildings around me, an overwhelming sense of familiarity began to pour steadily through my mind, slowly drowning everything else out.
"I've been here before," I said to myself.
"Yes," someone said. "You have."
Click here to read the rest...
Copyright © 2008 Lee Robson
