The Light's Last Touch--Part 2

I felt it coming up, tried to force it back down but found myself losing it and was sick.

My arms were shaking but I forced them to push me up off the hard boards and into a half sitting position. I was in my room but it felt unreal to me. The boards I had long ago memorized all the knots in seemed as if they were leaning in, closing up, trapping me. The light from the one window I hadn’t covered dared to penetrate the gloom and lit up my soiled black dress and the spot on the floor where I had been sick.

“I must not think--it hurts too much.” I muttered the words over and over to myself. “Must not let anything remind me of what has been, what could have been, what will never be—Stop it Cassy!” I screamed in frustration.

The harder I tried to not think about it, the more my mind focused on that one forbidden thing.

I had to stop thinking and since sleep insisted on evading me only one choice was left. My hand felt for the bottle and I brought it to my lips. It was empty.

I heard a tinkling of glass and found me head lying where I had been sick. What was this that controlled me, caused me to throw things in anger, with out even realizing what I was doing? Who had I become since the news came to me? Who would recognize the great blood in me as I lay on the floor in my own vomit, a broken bottle laying near, my black dress disheveled my hair stringing over my face, to week to even roll over.

I heard a squeak as the door opened and a dark girlish face peered in on me. Two large eyes peeped cautiously at me from under a spotless white cap.

“Get out of here!” a voice that was not my own screamed at my once petted slave. “Get out of here! Out with your spotless white cap! Out with your face that reminds me what he died fighting against! Out! Out!” The uncontrollable anger raised me up to my feet. I tottered towards the door waving my hand threateningly and the dark little face I had once loved disappeared, its tears silently reproaching me.

The bedroom tilted and I grabbed for a bed post. Leaning my confused head on the ornately carved wood I struggled to stay upright.

“Cassy do you trust me? Will you trust me?”

The quite voice haunted me.

Had that been a dream--a nightmare? Or had it been reality?

“Who are you?” I forced the words out of my dry lips.

The light slowly moved further and further across the room as the sun sank lower. It was like a groping hand, groping for me, trying to find me, to tell me that all was not darkness if only I---It crept closer, its rays lighting up the glass fragments. Closer even now, lighting up his picture where it lay crushed and torn on the floor where my anger had thrown it. Now it was lighting up my black dress expending its last moments searching for my face.

With the its last, and most beautiful touch the light finally found what it was looking for. It blinded me, for a while and then dropping my head so I wasn’t looking directly at it, I could see my black dress, wrinkled and covered with my vomit. Then it was gone and darkness wrapped me in its stifling arms.

In the light’s last touch I had seen what I allowed, even made myself into and it wasn’t pretty.

That was why I covered the windows, and this ugliness from even myself. Only this one window, I could not cover, the light that came from it somehow seemed to be trying to pull me back from what I had become and somehow, I wanted that.

Just for the record, I'll not post the final part of this story until someone besides Angela or I posts something.