Posted by Ensign Chloe Harland (Nurse) in Harland quarters When nothing matters what do you do
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 people’s lives will go on but for her it had ended on an average day no one would remember but her. On that unremarkable day, her world changed and became devoid of all things once treasured. Life became an endless eclipse of darkness that blocked the rays of the sun that had 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 because 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.

There were a million people Chloe knew she could call right now yet it was too much effort to pick up the communicator. What would she say to them anyway? The casual friends in her life would listen far more intently than those she held most dear. The Casuals would listen eagerly because they wanted to hear all the gory details of her bleeding and broken world. They would whisper rote promises which were not meant to console but act as a knife to further eviscerate the world she had built with him. The Casuals were not evil or vindictive but simply jealous. They simply wanted what she had. With each question or query about how she was doing, it would sever a layer off from her world proving no one could ever be that happy or content. Their words would provide comfort to themselves, not to Chloe, that the life the Causals trudged through was typical and Chloe’s world was just a fantasy that never existed. Each time a Casual uttered words like move on or life goes on, it reiterated the fact they simply did not understand. One does not simply move on when your world collapses. You go on but only as a disfigured entity with that part of you, the part of you that made you whole, amputated forever. It does not heal with time. It always lies as a scar with a festering wound just below it.

Burying her nose into the soft toy, she inhaled deeply desperate for any trace of his scent to bring even a flicker of light to the darkness of her world. “Come back to me. I can’t do this without you Hero,” she whispered into the void that was now her life.

Chloe Harland