Left Behind

Her emerald, almond shaped eyes shone in the dimly lit Cafe and her wheezy breaths reverberated throughout the sparsely filled Cafe.

Her unblinking eyes kept staring at me filled with a foreign emotion unknown to my troubled soul. As she took a step towards me, I moved backwards.

Her puffed up eyes begged for forgiveness but my stone cold heart remained rigid, unyielding to love.

She opened her chapped lips to say something but no words came out. It's hard to repent for mistakes you once took as decisions.

No words came out of my parched throat either and for a few moments a mother and her daughter stood in deafening silence, only separated by several feet and two decades.

And then as if she had found her voice she said, " I'm sorry."

She continued as she saw the shift in my emotions, as my fragile features softened.

"I shouldn't have left you behind. Oh you don't know how much I missed you. My heart always yearned for your presence. I love you so much."

Now she was standing before me her old wrinkled hands held my trembling ones.

Part of me wanted to embrace her and forget the pain and the heartache she had caused. But whenever I looked at her face I saw my sisters lifeless face in bathtub, jets of crimson blood flowing down her slender arms. And my father crashing on the ground, drinking away his sorrows and my own misery at being a reject. A girl whose mother had abandoned her when she was just two.

Clenching my jaws and putting on a facade to hide my conflicted emotions. I took a step away from her, she winced in pain as if I had slapped her across the face. I closed my eyes trying to erase the image from my head and without turning back I left.

I could hear her apologies even when I was two streets away, her words continued to echo in my mind late that night. I was held under the grasp of insomnia asking me to reconsider my harsh decision.