It is late when I get home, the clock says 13:00. I wonder how far that belief about the unluckiness of 13 goes. It certainly seems to ring true for tonight. I trudge up the stairs to the bedroom, not really bothering to be quiet. Yen rarely is awakened by sounds; it takes me all of ten minutes every morning to shake her awake.
Yen. I open the door a crack and hear her soft breathing. Pushing the door open, I step in and close it behind me as quietly as I can, not to avoid waking her, but so I can keep listening to the sounds of her slumber. Moving to the side of her bed, I watch her for a few moments more, then place my hand on top of hers. I can feel her pulses, her heartbeat. Its so warm and loving listening to the heart that she said I held in the palm of my hand, taking comfort in the one thing in life that I always could've counted on.
It strikes me this instant that I am thinking of it in past tense, when the last time I curled up in her arms to listen to that heart was just yesterday. But the events of tonight have put the things that I thought would always be present, into the past. I wonder if in her sleep, she can smell me, and the scent of someone else on me. I wonder if she would wake up tomorrow and feel that something's different about me, that for one night since the day I became hers, I was someone else's.
I tear my eyes and my hand away from her, desperate to find something else to think about, just to get away from what I've lost. My fingers find the desk lamp; the click of the switch seems so loud in this silence. The scattered sheets of paper and books are illuminated, a page on a paint catalogue screams out at me with a myriad of squares in different colours. My eyes are drawn to a square in a peachy pink colour which Yen has circled, but it is not this which holds my attention, but the colour right below it.
Slate grey. So dark a grey, it's almost black if you look at it too long, or maybe just not long enough. I reach out and touch the square, it's plastic-smooth under my fingers, and I realise this is the colour of life. That little bit of white mixed in makes you stick around for more to come, but sometimes you wish it was just completely black, so you could just give up on it.
© 2008 Fanshu. All rights reserved.
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