The room was dark and silent. The house felt like a tomb. Throughout her life, she had never understood what could drive people to desperate measures. Is it wrong that she now understood the idea of giving up. She had spent a lifetime being critical of people who thought this way. How can they just want to give up when there are so many people around them that love them? Sitting in the dark of the room the answer had sudden clarity. Maybe the loss of one person was just too much to bear. Maybe without that one person life falls apart and cannot ever be repaired. All the things that once mattered no longer held value without that one person you had shared it with for so long so why not just close your eyes and let it all slip away.

Taking a deep breath she held the stuffed toy close to her heart. She wanted to cry but that would mean she had the capability of feeling something. Her mind continued with its strange internal conversation as her fingers began to ache as it dug into the soft green fuzz of the toy. The world was going to keep turning and peoples lives will go on but for her it had ended on an average day no one would remember but her. In that unremarkable day her world changed and became devoid of all things once treasured. Life became an endless eclipse of darkness which blocked the rays of the sun that has always promised a new day, a fresh start.

One always imagines it’s the big things you will regret. A job not taken, a house not bought, an investment missed: the reality is none of that matters. It is the little things one contemplates and agonizes over in the end. The call you didn’t make becuase something trivial and meaningless pulled your attention. The gift you put back thinking it was a waste of money. The utterance of three words people spend their whole life chasing but taken for granted when they find it. That unremarkable day for the universe had broken her and it was only now she realized it fully.

Chloe Harland