Day 225 - Pulse Story

Pulse Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

In a moment of pain and compassion she let him go. It was his time. He had been gone for a long time, but the machines had kept him going. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. She didn’t want to make the decision, but she didn’t have any other choice. She let him go. It was all she could do.

The night was clear of clouds. Things had turned cold all of a sudden and it wasn’t the least bit refreshing as it should have been. There was no respite from the horrible deed that had been done.

She sat on a bench outside the hospital and cried. She would never forget him.

There was a flash in the sky and a streak between stars. It was just a brief moment and she wasn’t looking and didn’t see it.  Her mind was elsewhere.

Her husband had been sick for a very long time. They were both getting up in years, but he was getting old. Time was his enemy and he didn’t have much of it left. He knew it; she knew it, even if they didn’t talk about it. He had the private hope that he would go quickly in his sleep. She had the private fear that he would linger on for years, a broken shell inside, with her unable to care for him.

There were clouds in the sky. It was a nice and cool summer evening. Things had been hot, but the nights were pleasant and breezy. His bed had been placed near the window so that he could look out at the sky. He couldn’t experience the world outside anymore, but he could still see it and dream it.

She lay in bed next to him, with her arm draped over his chest. She had her head buried against his shoulder. He leaned against her and looked at the ceiling. It was going to end soon. That he knew.

Neither of them looked outside. Neither of them watched the night sky. Even if they had, the clouds would have hidden it, but there it was, for just a brief moment, a streak in the sky.

She had never gotten married like she had always dreamed of doing. When she was young she loved a man, but he had died in a car accident. It broke her heart and filled her with tragedy and fear. Even though people told her she would heal and love again, she never did. She moved, but she never moved on.  She always knew that he was the one, that he was meant to be hers and she his. He was her husband, even if they never had the chance to marry. She was the love of his life; he just never got to know it.

There were good nights and bad nights, but somehow after fifty years she still thought of him daily. Tonight was a bad night. It was the anniversary of the car accident. It was easier, but it still brought her pain. For some reason tonight it was worse that it had been in years. For some reason she cried tonight. Cried for a man she hardly knew and hardly got to have any time with at all. And yet she knew it should have been so much more.

She sat on her porch and watched the fireflies in the backyard. She didn’t look up or see the streak of light in the night sky. She had other things on her mind.

It felt like a mistake, a glitch, an anomaly. Love wasn’t supposed to feel like that, but it did. She knew she thought she loved him, but she wasn’t sure she knew what love really felt like. It was like an automatic, not a choice. It was like someone programmed her, but forgot to tell her why. She didn’t want to feel that way about him. She had been with him for so very long. But it wasn’t a true emotion. She knew that. It was a shadow of an emotion or it was what someone that didn’t really know emotions thought emotions should feel like. It made her sad inside. This man who had stuck with her and loved her and cherished her and sacrificed everything for her, and yet, here she was, unable to tell what love was and unable to know how she really felt.

She closed her eyes and said nothing. She couldn’t tell him. It was too cruel. It would be over soon. He would be gone soon. He didn’t need to know. It would do no one any good at all.

Maybe she felt this way as a safety mechanism, a self-defense of the body and mind. She couldn’t handle the pain so her mind made her feel something else. Maybe. She hoped that was what it was.

It would be over soon.

In a fit of love and sympathy she had set him free.

It didn’t make things any easier.

She shook, suddenly cold. It was a warm summer evening. She shouldn’t feel cold, but maybe she wasn’t shivering because of the temperature outside. Maybe she was feeling something much much worse.

Her mind wandered and she dreamt of the cosmos and the stars and the broad universe around them. She hoped there was a world somewhere else for them both. A world of ease and beauty. A world where things made sense. She hoped they were both happy.

The machines had been switched off. It would be over soon. Soon he would be free.

She had been killing him for years and she would be killing him for years to come. Nothing was ever painless or easy.