Pink Room
The Gentro Park was heavily wooded, and thus when I found the man in black, sitting on a bench somewhat off the main path for wanderers, I felt somewhat inclined to stay and see what he was doing — an action I somewhat regret to this day. He sat hunched over, looking directly at the ground, an earbud in his left ear, presumably for speaking to someone else.
He paused a moment at my arrival, and I believed he knew I was there for a second. However, he went back to speaking to someone listening through the earbud.
“Yeah… the room is back to how it used to look like, a blue home office — it’s been 3 and a bit months, one of my friends said he would make the room ‘normal’ again… No, I didn’t have the strength to fight him. His generosity at making it a perfectly normal-” He spat the word out as though it were one of the forest’s many flies, “room was just… I let him, that’s all I want to say. I haven’t gone in there, why?…”
He fell silent, then softly said “Why do you say that? — No, I feel like we took her out of our life way too soon. We should have waited at least a few more months — but we already just-… No, we gave away the stuff we had to remember her to another baby, he needed it. I feel so much regret already, but everyone says we’ve done the right thing. I don’t know if we have.
We should have kept Helen’s stuff — we should have more time to remember.”
He fell silent for a moment, studying the ground so carefully I thought he could have remembered months from the moment the specific location of every individual pebble and dust particle.
Eventually, he nodded grimly. “I-I just wish that-” his voice caught up in his throat and he paused a moment, “that we got to at least feel her life before she was taken from Patty and me by God, his powerful plan needed her… I don’t want to continue, no. I’ll just get out of this bench now. See you, I guess.”
He got up and slowly hobbled, then walked, through some trees. I didn’t feel any urge to follow him, so I know naught about the fate of him. I hope occasionally to this day, however, that man does well in whatever he does.
This is very short compared to what I normally like writing, but this was a story I knew I had to write the moment I thought of it — and reading through this website only sealed its creation further. The Star Legacy Foundation is a foundation dedicated to stillbirth, you may donate to it if you wish. I have also previously written about my thoughts on death, if you wish to read it. The writing prompt this is based off is here.
Farewell, reader.
