ROY
She glanced at the wristwatch on the table. The phosphorescent hands slowly ticked their way across the face. She picked up her phone.
“Hey.”
“Are you there?”
She waited. Nothing.
“I had a bad dream. I dreamt.. Of my brother again..”
She waited.
“I think I’m going out for a walk. I’ll wait for a few minutes and if you don’t text by then, I’ll have to leave my phone behind. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of battery left.”
She put the phone down and lay back on her pillow. In the silence of the night, she could hear the faint ticking of the watch on the table.
Her thoughts were a swirl of confusion. She didn’t close her eyes. She was too scared of what she might see. At least when your eyes were open, the horrors that haunted you were ones you could fight off.
She sat up. Looked around the room, as if looking around the room for the last time. Her hands were steady, her head shaking.
The phone buzzed.
“I’m up now. I was working. What happened, stranger?”
“I had a dream.”
“Are you still in the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I call you?”
He waited.
“No…No, you don’t have to. It’s better if we text right now. I might wake somebody up if I talk too loud.”
“Aren’t you the scaredy cat :’)”
….
“Aren’t you worried your catlike wailing would’ve woken them up already?”
“My nightmares aren’t ones where I get to scream.”
A pause.
“What were you doing up so late? I thought you would be asleep…”
“I was working on something.”
Pause.
“Tell me what it was about. Tell me what you saw.”
“No….”
“Weren’t you the one who agreed that talking about it helps?”
She stared at the text. She started to type.
“Back when Roy and I stayed together, he used to teach me about stuff. He knew a lot, a lot of things. He was the one who taught me how to solve the Rubik’s cube. I remember going to visit him a couple of days before he died. He saw the cube in my bag. You can’t imagine the ghastly smile that he smiled.”
“I know it sounds clichéd to say it, but when he died, it was like a part of me died with him. You wouldn’t believe what he meant to me. Having to let him go..”
“Can’t you try to let go of him now?”
“I don’t want to…”
“You know… He’s probably stuck too, between having to go and wanting to stay, but there’s this. Letting go of him would mean you get another chance to know him. Maybe in some other life, but at least you’ll meet him again.”
“Are you so stupid?! Stop with all of that sick philosophy…I don’t want to let him go! He’s one of the few good things I had in my life and like all of the others, he’s gone too now..”
“Do you know how it feels like to be so alone?”
He couldn’t answer that. There was only one way to respond to that.
“You’re not alone.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re not alone, kiddo. The people who love you are always with you, it’s just fate sometimes that you can’t see them.”
He waited. Put down his phone and rubbed his eyes. He glanced at the wristwatch on the table. The hands hid the time in the shroud of darkness. He looked at the time on his phone.
It was quite late. It was really late, actually.
He waited, but there was no reply.
Her phone buzzed. A call. She grabbed at it with blurred eyes and a shaking hand. She picked up.
“Are you there still, stranger?”
She nodded. Remembered he couldn’t see her nod.
“Yes,” she whispered
He didn’t ask her if she was crying. He didn’t ask her if she wanted to talk. He didn’t put down the phone, either. He listened to her silence.
She didn’t ask him to say something. She didn’t want him to say anything. She cried and cried and cried and cried, but it felt good to cry. It felt good to let it out.
She wondered why it was so easy to cry now. Maybe because, now, she couldn’t hear the sound of the wristwatch over the phone.
****