A Cascade of Waterdrops

She turned on the tap and let the water flow.

Is it an undefeatable truth that an abundance of joy always overflows into sorrow? She hates the looming sense of foreboding, like an over-hanging chandellier of doom, so precarious that the gargantuan glitter could crush down over her anytime, like a bomb without a timer.

There was a timer, to her chagrin.

"Ooz, ooz..tick...tok..."

The water continued to flow, leaving a cascade of reflections in the fog-smeared window, and the grandfather clock never stopped ticking by. Dragging her feet across the creaking floor of her bangalow----a shallow one painted in dark yet gaudy crimson, Eliza sank to her bed and fell asleep the moment she touched the bedsheet. An unquenchable feeling of searing hotness swelled over her sockets; her eyes were burning like promethane flame (God forbid) and she clamped them shut like a stubborn oyster.

She touched a furry coil of softness and clutching hard onto it. That was her sole comfort.

Dizziness. More dizziness. The unwelcomed, much-abhorred debilitating feeling was crawling all over her, crippling her mind, numbing her senses.

She fell into a rabbit-hole.

Unable to reconcile with "the unbelievable", Eliza succumbed to the power of hallucinations as they bagan to gush forth her mind like a quill.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Short-circuit again. And she could not cry "Foul luck".

It was bad luck for her indeed.

As if fumbling to fill up a void in her life, she struggled to fend off the emptiness, yet to no avail. Her mind was assailed by a slate of hallucinations of begone days, yet all they did was add the additional touch of sorrow that afflicted greater pain. She's been tripped.

Flashing smiles, gentle kisses and strides with aplomb. Those impressions seemed so faraway since Simon's departure. She could never fathom why he chose the hard way to get enlisted and join the Army, and she would never realise that he did it for more than a personal reason. All that registered in her jumbled mind was that he was gone, like a cascade of waterdrops, and would never come back the same person.

It was beyond the point of no return.

Her instinct guided her to move on, albeit the gushing-forth of all the tender memories they shared on those fulsome summer nights when they just sat snuggly together at the foyer of her yard and licked ice-cream together. The chill of her tongue was soon tranfered to her whole body and the sensation made her shiver with joy. The moon would always be mystiquely full on those nights, and in occasions shrouded by a simmering steam-coat like a beauty wrapped in gossamer. Simon would wait for her to finish her final lick, and help her wipe off the inadvertent smear of cream on her spectacles.

It was on those nights when sky promised to keep all the secrets that they opened the floodgates of heart to each other. Admiration took a long time to blossom but they clicked as if responding to some unspoken spell, daring and binding, drawing them closer and closer. They were spiralled into a wonderful place where only them two existed.

And now he is gone, taking all her merriment, expectations and spices of life away like some ginie finally deciding to shut the bottle, or Pandora finally claiming back her spell after unleashing tremendous rupture in the Earth. Irretrievable. Unfathomable, and even abominable.

Foul luck.

"Ooz...ooz...tick...tok..." The dripping continued, so did the grandfather-clock.

Her ebony hair, now disshevelled and entangled, losed all its lustre before, and her smiling eyes grew more and more puffy, misty and dreamlike. Every Saturday, she would go to the train station to check the incoming trains for the next week, and every time she went back in disappointment that no train would come from her expected destination.

She entered into the pupa state, waiting for the awakening that became her hope of salvage. But before that happens, she is a pupa in a trance.