C

by raimperial

The world was drowned in a sea of orange.  On the balcony she stood against forty-three years of tribulations and sufferings, triumphs and failures, joys and sorrows; carrying the brunt of the world on her aching shoulders; palms outstretched to the Creator whom she has never seen before, but has solemnly sworn to believe in and confide with, no matter how difficult. On the balcony she stood gazing at some unknowable relative space on the horizon, allowing her thoughts to wonder and wander around with the tidal winds that blew her thinning hair like venetian blinds that hung on wide windowed walls, as she waited, and yet not wanted, for a certain moment to happen.

She held the wooden railings that guarded her from a fatal drop, wooden railings that seemed to have gradually aged with her over the years. She looked down on the ground, to the grass patch that housed her unkempt potted plants, to the gravelled driveway, to the vines that crept in infinite directions, to the edges of the trees that fell short of height from where she advantageously stood, up to the sky, the clouds, and the empty spaces in between, and filled them with her memories from the yesteryears, with olden times where things seemed better in almost every imaginable way, and with moments that could not be relived yet could be reminisced from time to time. She wanted to fill them all until she had nothing left.

She stood in quietude, teardrops slowly falling down her wrinkling façade, like grains of sand painstakingly dripping inside the fragile contours of an hourglass. Then she shifted her gaze to the other side of the balcony where he, not even scraping past through his fifties, had been there sitting on a rocking chair all day, steadfastly sleeping yet at the same time fighting an unscalable and unpredictable battle inside him – a battle that only he could win. What could be more painful, she thought, to be waiting, and yet not wanting, for that certain moment to happen?