Red Red Rosie

Chapter Two

The ecstasy that follows a feed never lasts.

After the initial relief of seeing my youth return to my features my thoughts always begin to spiral. I'm sure the deafening quiet that plagues my isolated flat has a hand in it. All I have for company are my own thoughts, and the woman living inside my mind is a cruel authoritarian indeed. Like a judge with a gavel she sentences me to the dark abyss of self-hatred. Accusing fingers point at me from my walls. I cannot hide, nor can I quiet the churning in my stomach as the guilt that I am made to feel begins to twist and pull at my insides. My eyes begin to sting and tears fall.

Tears I have no right to shed.

I sit down heavily upon my ratty, floral sofa, and hide my face in my hands. But of course I cannot hide from the dark, because it is living inside of me.

I cannot quieten my thoughts. No television or radio show are able to drown them out. I close my eyes and I see the lad's pain-filled stare. Their eyes, drained of colour and of life always haunt me. Such handsome eyes that were going to see so much beauty, suffering great betrayal. They're not even given the chance to hold a grudge. They are not given any chance at all, as life is snatched from under their noses, their very last breath taken before they can even process their own pain.

They never have a fighting chance.

They never see me coming.

The shadow hovering in the corner of my eye pulls at my mind, making me look up from my clawing hands. There sitting upon the mantelpiece directly in front of me is a very old, framed photograph. I haven't given it much notice for a fair few years now, I didn't dare to. I didn't need more eyes on me, more disappointed looks.

Why am I feeling so drawn to it now though? It's as if the photograph is calling me to it with it's silent siren's song. I get up, cross my living room and pick up the dusty, wooden frame. I wipe its glass front clean and look at the two figures' smiling faces; two smiling faces that I missed with every beat of my heart. Seeing them again makes my heart skip and a lump come to my throat.

But I can't look away.

My parents were loving and fair. They had me in their old age. I was born after many years of them trying, losing, giving up, and trying again. Vicious cycles of hope, despair, fear and hope returning once more only to be underpinned with a clinging doubt that had a tight grip, which only got stronger as time marched on. However, they bravely persisted, until they could finally stop - the year I was born.

They called me their miracle, and they were ever determined to make sure that I wouldn't forget that I was the answer to all of their prayers.

"Oh, what a beauty you are, my lass, my darling, my very own little Rosie," my mother would say to me every morning as she tied ribbons in my curls. A loving smile never left her aging lips. Despite how ill carrying and delivering me made her, her happiness never faltered.

My father was equally filled with joy and I grew up in a love-filled home. My childhood never lacked laughter. I wanted for nothing.

Nothing except more time.

Each year I watched my parents grow weaker and weaker and each year the cruel vines of worry tangled their way around my heart. I feared the day that I'd have to say goodbye to the only family I had, and ever will have. I knew that they would be taken away from me before I was ready.

They died when I was thirteen, and the sting I felt was much worse than I ever expected. The pain that embedded itself inside me refused to dull and I cried myself to sleep for years after. Every time I lay in my bed, in the deep, silent night I thought of how happy they were together, how loved they made me feel and how unfair it was that the world felt the need to rip them from me.