Ave Maria

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There is certain stillness in the air, the moon attends, beaming brightly through obscurity. Mary gasps, taking deep breaths as she struggles to remain a viable part of a cold and cruel world. A world in which she gave everything, but received very little; yet she struggles against relinquishing her soul to the relief that is promised. She wants to know, to feel, to please, to be! Her enfeebled and belaboured heart struggles to usher the viscous sanguinity through weary corpuscular walls. She gasps for the air that makes this fight possible. Only the night nurse hears her gasps. She fights alone. She knows that she is alone, so she utters no name; she calls for no one.

Bravely she prepares herself as she approaches the other world, silently. The resistance weakens, and manifests only through the natural human reflex to grasp every molecule of oxygen that ensures another moment; another moment of loneliness. The hands of the clock moves just as slowly as the beating of her heart, it is twenty-one minutes past 3am. The hand circles slowly for another sixty minutes, then all is still.

It is early morn, September 22^nd, Mary moves into another realm of existence, time is arrested, and the world that I had known for decades, crumbles. Walls of comfort, protection, security, and identity, dissolve. And in their place remains nothing but a lachrymal diluvium.

And in the stillness of an aftermath, as I revisit the scene in my mind to the tune of the symphonic Ave Maria, I absent-mindedly pondered the question: did the walls of identity really dissolve……..…or have they been reinforced?