The Wish From Heaven | ✓

side stories | alison; destiny

Alison's motherhood

Alison Lockwood just could not sleep.

She has been tossing and turning on one side of the bed for what feels like hours, and yet, though drowsiness arrived, sleep hasn't. In the end, five minutes to three in the morning, she gives in, turns on the bedside lamp, and sits up.

The master bedroom feels strangely ginormous with only her in it. The bed feels incomplete without him on it. She feels the absence of the man who had confessed to her a total of 33 times like a hollow echo around the four walls of the room.

Daniel stays away from home sailing miles through the oceans for most of the year, and yet, never before has she felt such a suffocating amount of loneliness envelope her. Perhaps because the wait for him to return every time felt like a company, but in this particular case, there is no scope of waiting. If anyone is waiting, then it's him.

Or maybe she is waiting, after all. She is waiting for a phone call. Or she is waiting for him to suddenly appear in the window and plead to be heard out. Twenty five years ago, when Alison Grace was confined to a wheelchair after a sudden out-of-the-blue paralysis of her legs, Daniel had climbed a tree up to her fifth floor private ward, and knocked in her window. She was flabbergasted.

The conversation they had is as clear in her head as crystal.

"Daniel? Why are you here?"

"It's because I was worried about you. What happened?"

"I...my legs aren't working. They're saying I'm not doing well mentally. I don't know how it's connected."

"I see. I have told you so many times to pay more attention to your health. You never listen!"

"Y-you should leave."

"I will. But Lady Alison, have you considered my confession?"

"I have refused you several ti-"

"'Cause if you don't fall in love with me anytime soon, I will end up being mentally ill too."

She laughs by herself. Such a weird sentence. Only Daniel could ever come up with something like that.

The smile fades with the remembrance on what happened yesterday. Her heart clenches. She pushed him to his limit, what else did she expect in return? The throbbing headache troubling her since last night is getting worse. She looks at the empty half of the bed.

It had taken her over a month to be able to walk properly again. She accepted Daniel's confession and ran away from the town one night. It wasn't because she loved him back. She wanted to be freed from her cage, and Daniel was the only one who could give her that.

Both of them ended up dropping out of university and got married. With pure luck, he managed to become a ship captain after a few years.

For months after months, she went around like crazy hunting for jobs and giving interviews, but she found none. In the end, she gave up after Daniel's request. They had Dale, and she became busy looking after him.

Her self-esteem dropped to the ground. She thought she would come around to fall in love with Daniel some time. He was easy to love, after all. But the inferiority complex she felt for not being able to contribute to the family income, for having to ask Daniel for money for the monthly expenses, won against all other emotions. And it still does.

From her own parents, who slowly killed her inside with their pressures and expectations, she had learnt only one thing : how to not parent your child. And yet, she ended up doing the exact same things to her sons as it had been done to her.