Author: becky rttavi@aol.com
Rating: PG
Pairing: Michael POV
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Muse #6 - Fear
~*~
Thirty days is an eternity.
Thirty nights is even longer.
She had only been gone for thirty nights.
Michael Guerin felt his chest constrict and silently prayed that his aching heart would just stop without warning. He begged in the night that the next breath he would take would be his last. His requests were unanswered.
Thirty days had passed by with the concerned drop-in from friends and family, but then they were gone and Michael was alone. Alone to remember the sobbing and screaming that came from deep inside of him as Maria squeezed his hand for the last time and murmured that she loved him. Alone to dwell on the heartbreak he felt when his wife had taken her last breath. Alone to be alone.
Reaching next to him in the dark he was met with the now familiar cool of emptiness. Every night he reached for her. Every night he felt nothing. He rolled over and buried his face into the pillow she used to lay her head on. Her smell was almost gone. Gone but not forgotten.
The acrid reality of daybreak was approaching, but behind the drawn curtains Michael was left in the night. The break of dawn meant another day has passed since his love died. Another day to try to smile and pretend that everything was going to be okay. Another day to lie to himself and everyone else. It wasn't going to be okay. It was never going to be okay again.
The light of day would force him to walk among the living although his heart was dead. It would force him to acknowledge that his life had never been his own. The mundane activities that Maria took care of, the ones he always took for granted were now in his lap. The bills that needed to be paid before utilities were turned off. The finances that he never took the time to understand. The promises made by a mother to an infant son who would never know how brilliant and beautiful she really was.
Michael squeezed his eyes shut and tried to go back in time. Back to when Maria and him were first married. The love and promises. Till death us do part.
"That wasn't supposed to happen," he cried into the pillow. "It should have never been you."
The phone call still haunted him. The call that changed everything. The call from the hospital that his wife had been in a car accident.
Guilt racked his mind and body. The guilt was replaced by the seeping fear that had been lurking in his subconscious since the minute his wife died. Michael Guerin was afraid to live.
For ten years he'd had Maria. Through happiness and pain. Joy and sorrow. Maria was always by his side. From the heat of a wicked fight to the heat of intense passion, she never failed him. From fighting to earn his trust to delivering their only child.
He ran his hands through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut. Too much to do. Too much to be. There was just too damn much.
"Maria…" He sighed her name and almost waited to hear her ramble incessantly about something she had seen or read that day.
He longed to hear her talk nonstop about plans for a vacation or what preschool their son would attend. But there was no chatter.
Maria Guerin had been silenced thirty nights ago.
Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes into the darkness before the dawn. Ignoring the erratic beat of his heart and the state of lunatic fringe his brain was running on, he pulled the blankets off of him and faced the day.
He had new responsibilities. He was the only parent left to an infant whose mother was stolen from him. All of the things that Maria had taken care of during their life together were now his duties.
With a renewed vulnerability, he pulled the blankets back over him, over his head and hid from his new life of loneliness the same way he had for the last thirty nights.
end
