Dreams come true...

I wake up with a start.Yes.It had to be a dream.No.A nightmare.
What else could it have been..?
I am a little ruffled.Glancing at the alarm clock i groan…
still an hour more to go...this won't do.No.
Waking up in a sweat,night after night,only to curse the dawn.

I snuggle under my sleep warmed quilt and my hand reaches out
to stroke the cold half of the bed...it's a ritual now...
since the last seven months.
Still,I tell him what Angela told me about our baby, and I want to cry.
But the tears have all dried up,sucked out from me by the same dark
angel that crushed his skull to unidentifiable pieces that evening...

I feel empty inside...no feelings,none at all ,the way you feel when
rage,love,frustration..and all those feelings squeeze the breath
out of your lungs...am I slowly becoming detached...
or is it just a phase?

The sky outside is still dark…
a sliver of a moon is all I can see from the window..no stars..

The scars are all healing slowly, as if to remind me that it was,
perhaps,all my fault.
My fingers are lazily roaming over my belly...
a small smile playing on my lips.
But it is short lived.

Dan always told me I thought too much.
If he’d been here now he’d see how wrong he was.
Not that I have given up on the baser realities of life.
Only, I refrain from scooping out too much from my past and
my work is all that I care about.

I look at the clock, three quarters of an hour!
And I thought I could cheat time ..

I close my eyes.I have never felt this helpless before.

Or this lonely.

Just two weeks back ….
oh if only I could rewind the reel a little and
cut and paste “happiness” into my diary!

The phone rings.I know it’s mom.
She’s taken to calling me up everyday.
I tell her I have been good and that
I don’t eat out too much and that
I am doing much better..you know how it is with mothers…
I smile sadly…we never got around , in all these years,
to talking about our feelings…we never tried.
And now,it’s too late.Though, I never would know…

I walk up to the kitchen .
I had given up drinking coffee for the baby…
I heap..two spoonfuls of it into my cup and
wait for the milk to boil.

Why me??

And my thoughts drift back, inevitably ,
to the vivid wake-up nightmares I have been having
for quite sometime now…

A woman, heavy with child,
is lying on the floor in a pool of blood ,
a table lies ,upturned, a few feet away.
Her face is always veiled by her long hair.
Sometimes she moans,
sometimes she just gets up and walks away.
But the blood is always there.

Tears begin to fall down my eyes .

Today she looked at me in exactly the same way I did
at our large wedding frame ,
poised on the wall,whispering a tortured “I’m sorry Dan”

The milk has boiled over...