Never Look Back

• Ann Peng
• Short Story
• 2011

The wind swirled around her hair, reaching and brushing its long slender fingertips through it. Her white spotless dress seemed to dance freely of its own accord along with the tree branches that whipped around her.
Her body seemed so slender, so delicate compared to everything else. The soft crunch of my boots against the early golden-brown crisp autumn leaves made her head turn instinctively around. The person I had and still do dearly love had completely changed into someone else.
Her eyes, always so lively, so bright and always dancing with undying spirit seemed dull, devoid of all emotion, just a ring of red enveloping her dark brown eyes; her pale lips trembled slightly before curving into a hateful sneer. Something I hadn’t seen in a long time.
‘I hate you,’
No, this couldn’t be happening.
Hate, well it’s a word that’s commonly used by everyone. Most people these days use it without being aware of the true meaning of it. The devastating potential that is hidden behind those immensely powerful words.
Why with a sentence like that, a heart could be shattered into pieces. No, no, no, no. My mind just simply could bring itself to wrap itself around those three words.
‘Why Rose, why?’
That question bloomed suddenly in my mind, a spot of blood staining a white cloth. My mind whirled frantically through all the possible reasons, none seemed even remotely valid.
I opened my mouth yet nothing came out for my body was dead, just an empty husk that still operated all the basic human needs. No emotion flowed from my body. A shiver slowly crept up my spine as she turned her back once again to me, shutting me from her mind. Oh wouldn’t all the girls back in Miami just LOVE to see me like this? HAH I bet that would love to see the wreck I was now.
‘Go away Alex,’
A faint whisper reached my ears, no louder than the winds brushing us, yet I heard it as clearly as if she was right next to me. Her voice, once so mocking to me, once so strong and full of ambition, seemed weak and exhausted. My heart, felt like someone ran a red hot knife through it. It was an ache that couldn’t be soothed, a fire that just couldn’t be put out by water alone.
An ‘I hate you’ is easy to fix; people say that based on their current feelings or emotions, most commonly anger or frustration, but a ‘go away’? Well that was different, that meant not anger nor frustration, but just a dull emptiness. It meant that she’d given up on me. It meant that she’d already cut the string that joined us together.
Forever
My fractured heart, already so abused and torn,
Broke