That cry, that piercing pain drenched cry. It had to come. We had been waiting on each report, not with baited breath but instead holding it as if somehow it would stop that doom; like the covers pulled tightly over the head of the child fleeing the monster under the bed, a type of pointless comfort. The clock was ticking and his time was running out on and between each stroke.
I heard it from that world so far away, delayed and distorted through the telephone cables, and then I heard her barely a heartbeat later, but it could not have been a heartbeat for they had stopped right then in us all. She slumped and shrank, forever diminished as her cry tore a hole in her own heart and mine. Deflated now, that anchor that had held her secure and strong now dragging her down to the depths with its dead, dead weight. I remember her clutching me; pain can give such strength to desperate hands and arms, but there is nothing we can reciprocate except binding ourselves to that person, an impassioned but ultimately futile soothing.
Tears, well we all have tears; cry, well we all cry. But these tears and this cry were of those moments that in their rare and rawest expression are so rending that they chill blood, that they shiver spines and which split the mind in all directions like shattering glass on cold tiled floors. It is not pretty, and like stars falling from the heavens something is lost forever, indiscernible to the outside observer looking at the multitudes in the sky; but to those who knew, who were defined in their intimacy and proximity as either blood or true lovers, something very precious was ripped from our lives, vanished in that multitude except for those memories that forever traced those scars etched across our hearts.
2nd February 2015
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