I Hope This Reaches You In Time

• Chantal Gaudio, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2019

Sitting here in itchy chairs inside this little box we call a room; this dull almost lifeless foyer is where anxious hearts are racing and time is fleeting, yet I feel as though I’m in limbo. My foot taps to the rhythm of the obnoxiously loud tv program that played ‘Ellen’, a rather up beat show quite contradictory to the cold, bitter feeling of this waiting room. I believe it was in hopes of making people laugh as they anticipate the fate they are about to meet.
For a blissful moment I zone out to the white noise of the tv, but then the abhorrent clicking of the receptionist pen makes my body jolt in shock. I remember why I’m here for you, I begin to sweat. The little droplets pass down my freckles to my soft lip only this time the salty sensation leaves me in a panic, I really am scared this time. I then come to think is it even all that bad? I mean look at all the people around me.
The child sitting on the blue carpeted floors with the toys you know are riddled with germs, the child perhaps he doesn’t know the difference, seems happy, but he isn’t aware that his mother. is addicted to drugs. The hard kind, the ones that leave collateral damage behind. Him, his life doomed he is still so unaware. At the point his life is the sun before the burn. The lady next to me her unborn baby so blissfully sleeping is about to be a past memory of bad decisions and lost lovers. Abortion. She seems sad yet relieved. I use these people to distract myself; creating a fantasy really, but these two people are the unsung heroes of every story. The real protagonists real enough to show who they are. Each other patient hiding behind the pages of magazine, burring themselves with the life of the sanctimonious.
Yet I sit here waiting for you. Are you going to make it? I wish you could tell me so I can breathe again. Your hair luscious brown, soft to the touch, your eyes however are a raw brown the kind that I find myself getting lost in, but it complements your tan. I can still almost feel the touch of your hand wrapped around mine. Sometimes lingering touches are worse because if I’m telling the truth I can’t remember the sound of your voice anymore. In my head I know what it should sound like but it’s like a puzzle with missing pieces that you will never find until you turn everything upside down to discover. Is this my upside down? Or maybe this has just been my walk before the run.
But it’s your mind I miss the most. The intellectual spurs and the witty jokes you made. For you I will sit here and wait with the flickering lights, the obnoxious TV, the kid I wish I could save and the lady facing what might be the hardest decision of her life. But I will wait here, heart pounding and arms shaking for your melancholy mind to return to the same one I fell for.