"TALES OF GHOSTS"
about Love and Death from the Land of Mists
a collection of short stories
in the “Playing Another Reality” series
"DARK TOWER"
3. WHERE WE ARE NO LONGER
I enter this room. Damn! It’s empty again! You left… How many years ago? However, so did I. You left first and much earlier. We all leave, not knowing that everyone is leaving for their own direction.
I want to see you… madly… No, not even like that. It’s too important for me to see you, because I need to go further, and it doesn’t work out, that’s why I’m coming back here, since no one will tell me where you are now.
I always get into this room on the same day in the past, when all your things are still in their places. I don’t understand what and how to change in order to return a little earlier! It’s too important for me to meet you.
I go to the table, sit down in your favorite armchair and notice on the table sheets of white paper with your handwriting. Time is frozen. Here, in this room, on this day. For years I’ve been trying to get into it at least a day early before you leave, but every time I’m late! Damn it!
I know that your favorite flowers, violets, are going to wither on the windowsill, because they won’t be able to survive separation. You took with you the breath of their life, not mine.
On this day, the window, you used to open even in winter, when it was snowing, is always closed. I go to the window, and I have — for the first time in so many years! — managed to open it! Finally! At least something has changed!
The wind breaks the stuffy space and becomes the master of the room. I sit down on the windowsill.
Gray gloomy sky. Clouds. It’s cold. It’s raining.
It’s always pouring, on this day. No yard, no passers-by, no one and nothing can be seen through the wall of rain. The sky is crying with me, since it’s too late.
If I had known then that everyone’s leaving for their own direction, and perhaps we would never cross paths afterwards… But now I know for sure what will happen in the next moment. The door will be opened, and a little girl will enter the room.
And… yes, as before, for the 1,001st time of my endless returns, she is entering the room.
«Sorry!» I say embarrassed. «It was me who opened the window. I didn’t mean to scare you.»
The girl comes to the open window, and I feel scared for her, I instantly slam the sash.
«Don’t even think! No! The scariest of your life has already happened.»
I hug her, but she neither feels my touch nor hears my words.
And from the hopelessness and my own helplessness, the pain is being only multiplied by each my return! It’s the pain of a ghost who can neither rewrite the distant past, nor console himself in it, nor find the one he lost in order to tell the most important and overly simple, but somehow never pronounced in time,
«I LOVE YOU!»
1988–89