Greg requested Helen Magnus | "Awakening," by Mae
I'll disappear—take flight on the wind of wishing you were here
Fading light like a star whose life has been gone for years
And I'll fly across the sky, and I'll leave it all behind
If you'd be here with me tonight, I'll be fine, I'll be fine, I'll be fine
Loneliness comes in the littlest moments; small reminders grow an ache theretofore quietly cultivated in the depths of the soul.
She remembers.
She remembers a heart full of love and an embrace full of compassion. Full. It's a vague recollection, stirred somewhere down in her belly—in the very pit of her. Not in some imaginary place, she thinks; somewhere concrete and substantial, somewhere where it could be dug out if she could find just the right spot. Full. These days, even the words and the motions with the greatest sincerity are half-full, at best. Not half-empty—no. She already knows a part of her is empty, barren, dead; she doesn't need semantics to tug her further along the path to nothingness. And nothingness, she thinks—no, no, she knows—is inevitable. Eventually, she will have nothing and, in turn, become nothing.
Comfort too comes in the smallest gestures and moments of quiet solitude. The gestures are rare, and the moments rarer—but at the least, they steal gently into her being and remind her, in some small way, that she is alive. Death is so large and looming for the rest of humanity, but for Helen, it shifts positions, as some fixed point when one eye, then the other closes; it is never an object to be feared. It is always either an unachievable goal, far, far away, or an all-encompassing pit into which she believes she has already fallen.
The reminders edge her toward purpose; all humanity, all life, after all, has purpose. She clears away the debris blocking those tiny rivulets of Purpose, and death is swept into the distance again in the blink of an eye. She replaces the company of death with the company of lovers of all sorts, past and present. With Will and Henry and Kate and Nikola, and, in those moments of solitude, with James and Gregory and Nigel.
Tonight, alone, curling into the bedding with a pillow hugged tightly to her chest, her companion of choice is the daughter who once broke her loneliness when she could bear it no more. She breathes a child's strawberry hair, fresh and clean and frightened of the dark, curled safely into her mother's arms, silent save for the occasional quiet sniffle. She breathes and chokes on the single sob, the minutest sign of release. Release.
She sleeps with the recollection of a small body pressed into her breast and a name burned onto her lips, and although the rest of the world is dark, in the company of a ghost of a memory, she is fine. Not well, not happy—wellbeing and happiness are things of the distant past… but fine.
Helen Magnus thrives on emptiness and exists in a state of grey. Of alright. Of fine.