A Story for Rebecca

It was bright and cloudless the day they made the final decision; sunny, but not hot because of the delightful wind that wreaks havoc with stray hair and wayward leaves. She was sitting on the curb of the parking lot that belongs equally to the nearby church and hospital feeling a bit forlorn, having recently escaped the stifling confines of a hospital room crowded with members of her extended family. It was not that she felt nothing that she was outside while the rest of her family grieved by her grandmother’s bedside. She did not know how to comfort people, did not know how to be both eloquent and soothing, to say the right words at the appropriate time and to accompany all of the above with a warm gesture to show that she cared. At times, she wondered intermittently whether the people who were able to remain articulate were sincere or merely repeating like automatons what they feel is expected of them. Her arms ached to hold her mother but hung uselessly at her side as her mother resisted various attempts to be touched. Watching her family consoling each other in soft voices, she had never felt so awkward or so hopelessly inarticulate for a very long time.

In Memory

Image from ~YaraKlaproos at deviantart. 

It was a scorching summer day.

She was sitting underneath the large oak tree in her favourite park located in the out fringes of town, a pretty picture of insouciance, twirling a freshly picked daisy between her thumb and forefinger like she had not a care in the world. Nature was ringed in a beautiful sunlit halo around her, but her eyes were unfocused, vacant and unseeing. She was remembering; voices carried to her by an unfelt wind.

Time can never mend the careless whispers of a good friend.