Untitled Allergory (Part II)

HIS IDEAL (A GLIMPSE)

“Is she going to die?” he asked the doctor in the room. He sighed as the words finally made it out of his mouth. Though accompanied by others, all close friends or family, he was clearly the one who would do all the talking. He would be the one to make the tough decisions, to ask all the difficult questions.

The weeks and months leading up to this moment were unclear to him. How did they end up here? What had gone wrong? Even when she first fell ill, they took solace in one another. They had concluded that everything would be okay, that it would all work out just fine because they had each other, because they were together. Those hopeful moments in which they would tearfully embrace, their minds on both the future and the happy memories of their past, were now long gone, in a seemingly past life. They had sought help early on, and for a while they thought they were actually getting it.

He stared into her eyes. He knew she could see. Despite her catatonic, motionless state, her eyes were open and her eyelids, as far as he could tell, were the only thing on her body capable of movement. That her brain still functioned, her mind capable, he couldn’t be sure. He was
plagued by the distance between them, even as he sat inches from her face. But he knew she could see him.

She was positioned in a chair near the center of the room. The sight of the restraints, placed on her simply to keep her body upright, pained him even more than he thought they would. He had prepared himself for the horrific sight, yet upon seeing it, he had never wanted to reach out and help her more. Carefully observing the look on her frozen face, a mixture, he thought, of both sadness and fear, he battled to hold back tears, knowing that he was completely incapable of action. It was out of his hands is what he told himself.

“Doctor,” he said. The word unconsciously slipped from his mouth as he continued to stare into her eyes. “Doctor,” he said again, focusing on the intricate detail of each sometimes brown, sometimes green iris and then each small jet-black pupil. In their years together, he had learned to read all of her thoughts and feelings, just as she could his, just by looking at her face. Now, though, as he focused deeper and deeper into the contours of her soft, white face and the deepness of her eyes, he found himself completely unable to place her thoughts. It was as if she didn’t know him at all, as if he didn’t know her. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that, somehow, she was slipping away from him, maybe even running, somehow trying to die.

For a third time, he spoke the word “Doctor,” and now he actually thought he could hear the word reverberate off the floor, ceiling, and four walls. Holding his breath and turning towards the man in the white jacket, time seemed to slow. Finally acknowledging to himself that she, for the first time, appeared completely helpless, he asked again, “Is she going to die?” this time concluding, “Because I’m scared she might like to.”