Now and Forever

Now and Forever

Her messy hair and dark circles resembled the days she had spent waiting next to him, hopeless and mindless. An instant second from a car crash which was followed by what seemed to be an eternity in a coma: no sign of any consciousness.

It was a Friday night when she rushed into the ER without any cognition of what took place. Clueless. She lingered anxiously and impatiently outside the operating room. A few hours later that someone surged out the two doors.  

"He's lost a lot of blood, but we tried our best."

The room was extremely quiet and empty. There was nothing more than the hospital bed, ventilator, heart rate monitor, and IV holder. She hadn’t showered nor had she changed, and the coffee in her hands had already turned cold. She sat in a chair next to the bed and considered having to let go, leave, and move on. Thinking about that simply reminded her of all the times they had spent together. Like when they would sit on her rooftop at 2 a.m. in the morning. They would talk about the world, their dreams, and what the future would be like. She would stare into his eyes, those eyes that had always seemed to consist of an infinite number of galaxies. Then, he would look straight back into her soul and see through her scars. Those were the moments she held onto tightly and deeply cherished. Loving him was inevitable and she could never stop.

She watched over him with her dark and tear filled eyes and placed her head on top of his chest. She listened as his heartbeat slowed down…..and gradually stopped altogether. As her tears slowly streamed down her cheeks, she opened her mouth: “Just wait," she whispered, “I’m coming to see you.”

Pinimig. "You Need to Enable Javascript." Eyes Effy Stonem Beautiful Pictures. Gopixpic, n.d. Web. 28 Jan. 2015.

Headlights

Grubb, Ben. "Australian Government Offers $50m toward Bionic Eye Effort."ITnews. Nextmedia, 2 June 2009. Web. 23 Jan. 2015

"Peach rings?"

"Yes of course, peach rings!" He had once told me. "When I was just about your age, I used to sit on the edge of the sidewalk for hours, scraping the pit of the peach against the floor until it was perfectly round. Then, I just took out the inside of the pit and voila! I had myself a perfect peach ring."

He was the only person I wanted to talk to as we sat in the living room of my grandparents' apartment; I could sit and listen to him tell me stories for hours. My grandfather was not one for great speeches, he was in fact a fairly quiet man; but with me it was different. He always talked to me.  

***

We arrived to the intensive care unit of the Otamendi Hospital.

"How old is she?"

"16."

I looked down and tried to hide my face, as if the young nurse were to see right through my father's white lies and into my real age. She looked at me suspiciously. I am sure she knew from the start that I was in fact younger than I claimed. She looked back into the empty corridor, then back at us; she sighed.

"Follow me."

My father knew exactly where the room was, but that day was really not the day for discussions. The corridor was dead silent, ironically. My feet felt heavy as we walked down the crystal clean, white hallway. I clutched my left fist as hard as I could. It was freezing. I looked up at my father, his expression unstirred, anyone who did not know him would think he was just buried deep in thought; but unfortunately, his eyes told me otherwise. The usual radiant, grayish-blue color was now washed away by countless days of sorrow. His look was empty, vacant.

We stopped at a pristine white door with a golden handle on it. Disregarding its spotlessness, the door seemed rather uninviting, perhaps because of what it was holding inside. Hesitatingly, the nurse turned the handle and slowly opened the door to a regular sized hospital room, a white rectangular bed, and my grandfather.

"You all have the same eyes" said the nurse, with a tone of compassion in her voice. She then turned around and left the same way we came in, shutting the white door behind her.

We sat beside the bed in a complete silence that was only interrupted by the intermittent beeping sound of the machines monitoring his heart. Suddenly, without a warning, my grandfather opened his eyes. They were two beams of blue light, like two headlights, pouring onto every corner of the room and drenching us in that warmth I had yearned for so long. The medics said his look was due to the morphine, but I knew that not even a tidal wave of analgesics and sedatives could produce that gaze; it was something different, more abstract. I felt a weight lifting off my shoulders when I realized that this was the first time I saw my grandfather, I wouldn't say happy, but at peace. The two headlights that had first illuminated the wall opposite the bed slowly turned my way, scanning me all over and finally resting on my own eyes. I don't know how much time passed until I felt the urgency to be with my grandfather, alone; I knew this was the last time. As my father left the room I could feel my heart beating inside my head, I took a deep breath. I opened my left hand, which I was clutching so hard, to reveal a small, brown ring. It was not nearly as glamorous as my grandfather had described it; but it was the best I could do. I looked at the hands which had once held me up and close to his chest that now lied defeated by his sides; I took his delicate hand and, without saying a word, slowly slipped the peach ring onto his pinkie finger. The tracheotomy had taken away his speech, but as he laid eyes on the small circlet, he raised his right hand and I felt the warmth of his touch on my cheek, I looked into his kind and welcoming face and I knew exactly what he wanted to say. And as he slowly put his hand down again, the lights went off and I heard a single, long, and interminable beep.

The Eyes

Eccles, Chris. Arctic Fox, Blönduós. Digital image. Flickr: Eccylad. Flickr, 20 July 2010. Web. 21 Jan. 2015. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/53244388@N00/4831524565>.

The yellowed bones dangled, stripped of their pelt. Flesh, muscle, and soul decayed. Empty sockets yearned for eyes to fill them. Were they blue, like the depths of the oceans, or perhaps green as a hallowed forest? His mouth, once carrying secrets and kisses, was now bound in a perpetual, humorless grin. Every emotion, every thought that marred his porcelain skin with its advent, bleached a sickening, sterile white. Were his hands strong, his back firm, his hopes pure? The skeleton once moved within a living man, now known merely as ‘Homo Sapien.’

Such were the thoughts that occupied Everly’s mind as she moved like a whisper across the crooked wooden floors that hadn’t felt her weight in many years. Her gaze darted from squirrels to armadillos, from leopards to wombats. She was in a dead jungle, a zoo that reeked of formaldehyde and dusty furniture. Father’s museum had always fascinated her. It had become a sick obsession that itched at her mind and kept her awake at night. For years, she struggled to rid her head of the thousands of unblinking eyes that stared at her. But they never stopped staring.

She now moved her fingers delicately over the thick glass that contained her childhood pets. Their fur looked just as soft as the day they came home. Father used to duck through the back door, a rifle in one hand and a burlap sack in the other. She would bound down the stairs to see what Father had brought. What would it be today? Were her pleas for a snow fox finally heard? Father carefully placed his weapon on the counter, always meticulous in avoiding dents and scratches on his prized possession. He then coarsely grabbed the sack by the bottom and shook out its content. A flash of two polished black orbs held Everly’s eyes before the body met the counter’s surface. A red stain sullied its white pelt while the fox’s tongue lolled out of a lifeless face.

“He’s perfect! Oh Father, he’s just what I wanted! I’ll call him Theo!” Everly cried.

“Now, now. Let Father fix him and then you can play all day long.” A smile grew on his lips. The red puddle widened on the countertop.

Theo stared at her now through the transparent barrier that separated time and space. He was still as young, still as lively as when she took him to run around the rose bushes in the garden twenty years before. She would walk him to the top of the hill to be her audience as she laid on her stomach and rolled down to the bottom. These happy memories, though, began to plague her when she moved away from home; they were a sucking, pulling rot feeding on her maturing conscience. The same preservant Father rubbed into these creatures was smeared across her naive vision. It concealed the decay behind each ‘pet’ Father had given her smiling, and the blight of her playing with them as if nothing was amiss.

Father worked all day. She would catch a glimpse of his white lab coat through the basement keyhole before it disappeared behind a rack of flasks and tubes. That’s how she would know he was still there. That’s how she knew that Theo’s cold, glassy eyes hadn’t replaced the deep, brown ones of her only living companion, the eyes through which she had learned to see the world. She was lonely and tormented by a profound, cutting isolation. She needed someone. Mother had gone where the foxes are long ago and she needed a friend.

Everly swept through the rows, not a child but a flash of a child’s lingering pain. Faster and faster she moved. She was running. She ran among her bears and her lions. She danced with her bluebirds and waltzed with her wolves. She played with her childhood friends until her steps were retraced. Once again she met her fox before collapsing to the uneven floor. Thousands of eyes stared down at her. The eyes that had kept her up at night. The eyes that watched as she rolled down the hill. The eyes that held hers as Father emptied the burlap sack.

Everly gazed deeply into Theo’s eyes as she had done a hundred times. And the fox blinked.

Day and Night

Time has changed on planet Earth. People have changed on planet Earth.  Every Day since January 10, 2101 people have been waking up during the night and sleeping thru the day. Nobody has a clue on as to why or even what made this dramatic change. All they know is that there is no going back. Emma, the girl depicted in this photo is sleeping thru the daylight and awaking during the nightfall. You can see Emma’s skin is a washed out : she doesn't get enough sunlight to get a pleasant light brown skin tone.