Ash and Eyes, A short, true story

[Skarlet]

[align=center]Ash and Eyes

 

“What's wrong, princess?” He asked, he had sensed that something wasn't right, she was sad, but that wasn't all, he stared at the screen, awaiting her reply, he watched the notification that she was typing, appear at the bottom of the Windows Live Messenger window, he was concerned, he loved her deeply, he hated this, knowing that she was so upset, and that he was too far away to embrace her, to comfort her.

“Mum took my smokes.” he read the reply, his heart filled with pain, his eyes with tears, and his mind with painful memories. She'd told him that she quit, that she wasn't going to do it anymore, but she had accidentally confessed the lie to him, He didn't love her any less, but it hurt almost unbearably.

He found himself sobbing, casting his mind back to his father, He turned his head, and looked up at the picture on the wall, the man he saw there was strong, powerful, loving, and despite his actual age at the time of the picture of roughly fifty, he appeared to be youthful, completely unravaged by age, but that was before the cancer. He turned his head slightly, he saw another picture, the same man, a few years later, all but bald, what little hair he did have was gray and curled, as opposed to his usual straight, dark brown. His face now appeared ancient and wrinkled, his skin bore a yellowish tinge, But it's what the picture didn't show that hurt the boy the most, in this image, his father wore a pare of large, dark sunglasses. Why? To hide the ravages of the cancer that was slowly destroying his body from the inside out. By this time it had reached his kidneys, and they were beginning to fail. The sunglasses hid a pair of yellowed, dying eyes. Only now, three years later, did the boy realize the significance of these yellowed whites. He closed his eyes, but the immediately snapped open, the image of dying eyes haunted him!

“Why did he have to funking smoke!?” The thought echoed around the boy's head. It was killing him, to think like this, but he couldn't shake it. With every blink, there they were again, the yellow eyes of his childhood hero, staring back at him, containing two things, love, and impending death. He kept his eyes open, through pain, through tears, the image was unbearable. He remembered those eyes too well, they were the last thing he ever saw if his father, the memories, and the guilt flooded back into his mind. “Get funked you old bastard!” the words echoed through his mind, and there he was, standing over his father in the hospital bed, fists shaking with rage and guilt. He ran from the hospital, so haunted, so terrified by the vision of his father's eyes, and by the guilt that would follow him forever. He thought back to the week before that. Meeting his half-brothers for the first time. He remembered smiling and laughing with them, but he also remembered the look on Todd's face when he saw the state his estranged father had regressed to, he remembered the grown man, nearly crying at the site of those eyes. It was getting hard to take.

He threw his mind forward again, to the day after he'd spoken the last words to his father, he couldn't help it, even the idea of the girl he loved so much risking the same fate as hero, his father, was tearing him apart. He remembered, he didn't know that his father was dead. He had a D&D game that day, his mother walked into the house, she'd been crying, you could see it in her eyes, and down her reddened face.

“Your father's dead” She had whispered her voice was hoarse and her throat must have been horrifically painful. At first the boy didn't believe it, but then he saw his mother sit down at the kitchen table, lighter in hand, she too ignited a cigarette, a cylinder filled with tobacco and death. His mind wandered again, now he was at his father's funeral, after the service, when the tear crowd of hundreds of people who he truck-driver had known, and loved and helped throughout his life were departing, he saw his mother lighting yet another cigarette. In a fit of rage, and mournful sadness, he charged toward her and knocked it from her hand. He blinked, and with another haunting look at the dying eyes of his father, he had returned to the presant.

“I thought you quit, baby, you told me you quit” his fingers were quick to find the marks.

“YOU DON”T KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO JUST STOP! YOU DON”T KNOW WHAT I”M TRYING TO DO!” he read the words with instant guilt, he'd just been projecting his fear onto her, he couldn't stand the thought of seeing her the way he saw his father on that last day. She didn't understand.

“I'm sorry baby, I'll just go” He said these words aloud before typing them, the tears had, by now, soaked his shirt. So he removed it and hurled it to the ground infront of his computer, he spared the screen one last glance, but promised himself that no matter what he would go, leave her to calm down without him.

“No. I'm sorry”[/align]