Empty

Every day at daybreak she gets out of her double bed and slowly walks around it to the other side. Once there, she mechanically opens the bed, sits at the edge of the mattress, raises her legs and lies down. Slowly she slides her feet in-between the cold silky sheets, immediately her warm body starts to tremble, instinctively reacting to the chilly sheets.
After getting in, she takes almost a minute to find a comfortable position, she turns to one side, then to the other, curls herself in and then stretches out; in no longer than five minutes she is sound asleep and smiling…

At 7:30 am the alarm clock began to play a tender melancholic melody. Antonia opens one eye, then another, a few seconds later she gives a lethargic glance to the diffuse early morning light coming through her bedroom window… a bright smile dresses her pretty face as she happily greets the new day. With laziness she stretches out her arms and legs covering up the whole bed… the coldness of the other side of the bed suddenly bring her back to the cruel reality…
She has to force herself to slowly turn her face to the side, the emptiness and loneliness of the other side overwhelms her with sadness. Suddenly her morning happiness evaporates, her expression abruptly transforms, given place to a harsh looking face that has no resemblance with the one that woke up five minutes ago…

Who can be playing such cruel jokes? How can someone be so malicious? What is that person trying to get from her?
A thousand questions outdo her thoughts, leaving her confused and annoyed. She can’t call the police again, they don’t believe her. They keep saying that she is making it up, that she must go for some therapy, that she is still mourning his passing…
But how can she be grieving someone who betrayed her, who left her without any warning after all his promises. She isn’t mournful, she isn’t crazy, she doesn’t need any psychiatrist help, what she needs is the useless police to catch the son of a b@#@ that is messing up with her.

From the minute she met him, she knew he was too good to be true, as good things weren’t on her life menu. Antonia was familiar to betrayals and desertions, her very own mother taught her very well about that. But, she thought God had given her a break when she met Alejandro. So she stupidly put her fences down allowing him to get into her fragile heart, believing that for the very first time in her very painful life she was going to experience love to its fullest. But, what she didn’t know and never expected was that it was going to last only two years…
Why did he have to go to pick the stupid flowers to surprise her? She didn’t need early flowers in the morning, she needed him, his smiling face waking up next to her, his tender arms hugging and protecting her, his masculine scent overwhelming her and getting deep into her skin. But he insisted that it wasn’t enough, that she deserves much more and he wanted to give everything to her.
He forgot the most important… he forgot to stay and instead got killed. An accident, a stupid accident took the love of her life away… now all that is left is an empty bed, in an empty bedroom of an empty house of an empty woman…

From the bedroom door she looks at the empty bed… both sides undone as if two people slept in it… “Maybe Alejandro comes every night to sleep with her” she says to herself, but then she erases that stupid thought, she doesn’t believe in ghosts, she only believes in what she can see and touch.
Today she is going to change all the doors locks once again, she’s going to fight back, she isn’t going to allow anybody to mess around with her. She is a warrior with strong armor and immune to warm feelings.

Antonia looks once more to the empty bed, seeing everything in black and white, she isn’t aware that since Alejandro passed away she doesn’t see colors any more…

This post is a submission to Magpie Tales #24, writing on a theme of the above photo.

© 2010 Gabriela Abalo