Enjoy this chapter peeps!
Ezekiel's POV (Point of View)
Everything felt so dark. I could hardly pinpoint my left from my right, why did it feel that way?
Why was everything dark? Am I blind?
"Yes yes— No, it's just Ezekiel and I with a few of our friends and a pastor that ought to be there to finalize the burial rites." With a still and unstablilized heart, I overheard my dad speak to God knows who as I passed by the kitchen on my way to my room.
Who is he talking to? I asked myself as I turn a left turn to the hallway housing my room.
Why was he so calm while making arrangements for his wife's burial? A wife he had been know for as long as twenty years, might I add. Wasn't grief supposed to hurt? I thought the thought of losing someone was one of the greatest punishments a man could render to the heart, why did he have to contradict me? The burial is in two hours, I have never been so anxious in my whole life.
I passed by the guest room that has for the past few months served as her personal space, long before her illness took over her whole being and she had to be hospitalized, and I felt hot unstoppable tears prickle my eyes. Memories came flooding back as I tried so hard to remember a moment that I had spent alone with her in peace. I tried so hard to remember but to no avail, perhaps they had all vanished in the momentum of my grief.
My heart clenched at the fact that she wouldn't be here again to give me the chance to make things right. It's saddening obviously, that our family would forever be incomplete and void till the end of time. Am I unfit to admit my lack of readiness to the feeling?
Tears started to blur my sight.
With heavy steps and a downgraded shoulder, I turned to the opposite wall where my room was situated at. With unshed tears in my red eyes, I walked in, closed the doors, and sat on my bed. Afterwards, I picked up a scrunched up paper in which my last words to my mum as she may unmoving in her bossom till I have to see her no more lay, and yet I couldn't do it.
How could I abandon the hands that had fed me and showed me so much love, even in her absence?
That wasn't possible, so I resulted to the next available bit cowardly option. I simply srunched up the flimpsy piece of white paper and threw it across the room.
I couldn't do it. How could I look her in the eye and pretend as if okay, when infact, I stay have a lot to say to say? How could I tell her that I was just a few moments from losing my feet, to losing it all?
Slowly, I slid off my bed and went down on my knees and with my ball-fisted hands squeezed painfully between my thighs I cried out to someone I knew was the only one capable of bringing dead people back to life. He has done it countless times before, and I had no visible doubt that he could do it again.
"Jesus," I cried softly, my voice muffled and hoarse like sandpaper. "I need you more than ever in my life right now, please have mercy and show my your loving eyes of kindness." In a way, asking God to bring her back to life seemed somewhat selfish. My brain struggled to relieve a memory, when I had asked God to relieve mum of her pain.
Was that why He killed her? Because he felt she had suffered too much and deserved peace in a quiet place?
I wasn't particularly a person of faith, but honestly speaking, within the span of a few months, I had gathered more than than I ever had in my entire life.
"Ezekiel?" I heard someone call my name, but it sounded so far away. "Ezekiel?" The owner of the voice knelt beside me and enveloped me in a very much needed warm and comforting hug.
"Ezekiel, you have to let go." The voice which my brain had registered to be Ruth's voice spoke out again. I could care less about not being the same person in front of her, for she had seen me in my worst days.
"We need to leave now." My dad called out.
Leave for where?
A new wave of anger surged through me after I heard my dad's voice. I stood up almost immediately and closed my door with so much force that I feared that it must have as well been broken. "I
You can go ahead to say goodbye dad, because I won't pretend everything is okay. Leave me, I will be fine on my own." I yelled back at him.
"Zeke—" Ruth voiced out, her face scared shitless as she stood up and tried to pacify me. However, I shrugged her arms off of me and asked her to leave quietly so I could shed tears in peace and mourn for the dead.
I could feel my ears burning and tears stinging my eyes. With anger in the stems of my blood, I threw my duvet off my bed and my pillows across my room. Afterwards, I jumped on my bed, kneeling on it whilst screaming my heart out. I don't know how long I kept screaming, bit I didn't mind, even with my cracked voice. Maybe if I screamed loud enough, God would hear me from heaven and have mercy.
"Zeke, please stop. You're hurt, it's normal, but you owe your mum your last respects." Ruth screamed, matching my tone— And it was the first time she had ever screamed at me and so I obeyed quietly.
My screaming reduced immediately to whimpers as I lay broken and weak on my bed. She climbed on the bed and laid down with me. She was so close, so close that I could perceive the body-relieving scent of her shampoo and it greatly calmed me down. Vanilla, my personal favorite for years.
"You have to let go Ezekiel, she is gone to a better place, a place where she won't feel any pain. She was an amazing woman.
She was in pain all through the time we both went there after school, yet she persevered for our sake, it will be selfish of you to hold on to something that wasn't yours to begin with. She has fulfilled destiny by being your birth mother and giving you to us. You should get up and go pay your last respect to that amazing woman, and I promise that you won't so it alone. We've always been at your side, and we will forever be." She concluded, and suddenly I had strength to conquer the unknown. She must have been sent by God, for she was too angelic not to be of God.
Ruth walked up to me and entwined her fingers with mine and gave me one of the saddest smiles I have ever gotten in my whole life. Immediately, realization hit me and I began to see things in a new light.
I wasn't the only one who had lost a kind soul. My dad lost his wife too, Ruth lost lost a friend—Since their relationship had developed over the months— But she was hurt too. We were all hurt, yet we tried to hold onto the little thread of hope that we all had.
"We should leave." Ruth whispered, still not breaking eye contact with me. We both stepped out and met my dad crouched in front of mum's room, and he was crying. And for whatever twisted reason in me, I felt relieved and at peace.
We both stood there in silence as my dad's heart-wrenching sobs filled our lifeless apartment. And after his throat had run dry, due to him crying for over ten minutes, my dad stood up, red-eyed and with a badly swollen face. Without saying a word to each other, we all trooped into one of our cars parked within the vicinity.
In that same uncomfortable silence, the three of us drove to the cemetery. Ruth didn't let go of my hands as we stepped out of the back seat. She didn't let go as the casket was lowered into the ground. She didn't let go while the priest read out whatever it was priest read on corpses.
Only heaven knows how many times he has done this preaching of a thing over peoples corpse. I kept mute all through, didn't shed a tear nor did I move a bone, since I had learned to accept it all.
I heard my dad ask Ruth if she had anything to say but she said no, and stood firmly by me till the end.
That act of hers gave me a fuzzy feeling all over my body.
* * *
Everyone had left and if was now realistically dark.
The priest left immediately after the program— which made me to wonder whether he has felt ant sympathy for the dead— my dad had wanted to drag me with him but I had objected, since I need a moment with mum for the last time. A few of dad's friends came, but they left too until the mortuary became a deserted place once again.
But Ruth stayed with me, and our cold hands stayed entwined.
With one glance, my eyes swept the whole cemetery but rested on my mum's new home. I smiled sadly at the words inscribed on her grave, gone too soon but loved forever.
My gaze then finally rested on the angel in human form beside me. It's saddening to think I once hated this girl, hated her so much till the extent that I wanted to break her heart.
As if sensing my gaze on her, She turned to face me. "You did amazingly well today Zeke, I am proud of you." She smiled at me and pressed a kiss on my forehead. And I refuse to admit that amidst all the chaos, I felt jitters of joy in my tummy, even in the presence of my mum.
I nodded solemnly at her but stayed quiet. Right now, I just wanted to enjoy the peace and quiet, even for just a few minutes till I have to no more.
"What next?" I heard Ruth question beside me, voicing the question that I had kept licked in me for days.
"What next?" I repeated the simple but heavy question to myself. "Right now, I take a step and hope for the best."
"No major plans for the future? Not until for after graduation?"
I have no future instore. There's nothing to wish for anylonger, I can only wish for the wind to take me away, so I don't have to suffer no more.
"I do have major future plans."
"Really? Tell me." Her voice held so much excitement and joy that I feared for myself, for I didn't want to taint her with my resentment.
"I relocate to America for good. And hope that these painful memories linger behind me, not to forget the past but to embrace what's to come before me."