Page 124 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #3

Beneath the veil of tears. Stripped of my life. Dead but unable to die. Streaked and scratched, the gray
emptiness of the rayn washed across me. I closed my eyes, hoping Mark wouldn’t sense that every
tear the rayn shed was one I could not. Every tear the rayn shed, cut me. I watched as my sadness
bled across the gray wetness of the world...........

And then it rayned. Still falls the rayn.

“.......Not time, nor distance, not even death itself can take the memories of you that are nestled
against the darkness that owns My heart. I pray thee know that even the darkness that long before
My birth did take Me cannot murder the love I have for you nor steal from Me the memories that I
cradle silently in every thought, in every word…….” As though each word had to be penned before
the last moment of my life passed, I watched the words appear on the face of my laptop. Faster still.
Pain rising. Confusion taking hold. Trying not to think. Trying not to ask. Trying not to feel. I take
a deep breath – so deep I fell the cool of the nyght air against my bones – and yield my pain to the
rayn. “Cry for me, please..........”

I remember now. Somehow, the non-linear conversation Mark and I were having about my photog-
raphy had spun round me a web of my own pain. And in the middle of that web, sat Mark. “Empathy,”
said Mark, pronouncing the world so precisely that every subtle nuanced intonation dripped with
significance, “is a two edged sword........”

I was gone again. I knew where this was going to go and I didn’t want to be there when he took this
thought to its last and logical conclusion.

“Sometimes,” said Mark, his voice growing stronger and his intensity invading the space between me
and the rayn, “sometimes the best way to be empathetic is just to cry with someone.”

I repeated what he had just said to myself. I knew it to be true. I recoiled. I tried to move away. I
looked past him again, but he wouldn’t let go. Instead he repeated the words, the words that were
like a saber pushed through my heart......... “Sometimes, the best way to be empathetic is just to cry
with someone.” There was no breath in my lungs. My heart screamed for me to intervene, to save my
own life. But I couldn’t. The pain had freed itself. I had nothing left with which to fight it. I would
die...........

And then it rayned. Still falls the rayn.

“I pray thee know that burdens Me a sorry so deep that I cannot cry the tears.” Even with my eyes
closed, even with the weeping of the rayn, the words couldn’t stop. My sadness was free and there
was nothing I could do. I was hers to do with as she pleased. “For I know only now how deeply I
wounded you. So blind was I that I did not see that I cut you as others had cut you, I wounded you
so deeply that even now I know not how you hold Me dear to you, and when I knew, instead of hold-
ing you within the safety of My arms, I wounded you again with my bitterness. I pushed you away
with My emptiness. I turned away from you – driven by My fear, the fear that like water spilled
upon the ground, you would no longer love Me.”

124 | Still Falls the Rayn