shorties 2

Shadows


It was a rainy afternoon. He was at the cemetery, standing over a very familiar tombstone. Now it looked unkempt and uncared for. She wouldn’t have liked it; she was so neat…..

It has been over two years now and he still cried his eyes out every time he visited her. Why not, he thought?

They were so young back then. But they were matured in that way that only young people can be. The department store where they first met was still small and cheap. But it also offered the best bargains in town. Which was what brought them there in the first place one evening three years before.

How beautiful she looked in sweater and maong. Love at first sight? Why couldn’t he have met her way back still? They could have had more time with each other…..

A month had passed before they finally decided they were so much in love they just had to get married. So they did, even if they were barely legal. Besides, they were tired of waiting, tired of wanting each other fully, tired of not being able to stand one more night of just kissing and groping.

He thought that it would end happily ever after. But damn those fairytales and movies, it was not to be. It was not yet two months before she was diagnosed as positive.

He did not become a father. The baby died and she followed suit due to some mumbo-jumbo and a lot of medical jargon he doesn’t want to remember. All he knew was that it was a very serious disease, and a very painful one.

Now he was back again with nothing but his tears to hide and flowers to bring. She is gone now, they tell him. But she is not really, not in his dreams and memories and in the living pictures that play like a soundtrack to the bleak movie in his heart.

She is gone now, they tell him. She’s nothing but a shadow of a dream that might have been. Yes, but what a shadow……what memories, what memories.

Years later, a priest stood over her grave with the same flowers in his hands, the same smile on his lips. How romantic, was how many would call it. But the cemetery guard thought otherwise. He would always say –

“How terrible!”