Time, only Time - Part 8

Living back with his parents, if not helping him get along with all the recent changes in his life, made him feel younger. This was for one thing due to the responsibilities he did not have any more and for another because of what he had called “the reverse effect”. “The reverse effect” was mainly a summary of all which he had gone through during the past year and leading him to his present state of having no job, no future plans, no goals, no specific fears but just thoughts of a single person in the world to fill up his days.
His days were mostly dedicated to swimming, helping his still working parents out - and sometimes one or two old neighbors - and reading the paper. Whenever visiting a friend or having a guest, he used his finest pretending skills to cheer up and have a good time, still leaving his mother’s cousin as an exception. Every time she was there to visit, the two would lock themselves up in his room and he would crush in her arms and cry as loudly as possible. All this together made him feel like a 13 year old who sees his life coming to an end because he fails to recognize what the essence of life is to be.
But he could. After 42 years of living on this planet he could. And he knew that he had either reached or achieved every thing else but this very essence. He had given up only the greatest dreams of his. He was damned and the curse upon him was waiting for the best matching time to be fulfilled; he could feel this time approaching.
All he could do was reading, he read every book he could get his hands on, waiting up his fate as if admitting that everything has already been long over and the remaining time was just a logistic delay of death, or maybe the fact that he had his hands full somewhere else and was busy dying more important or interesting people than a lousy loser like him.
He had reached a stable status of having accepted his new life when the unexpected happened: she had come over to visit him. He could not even say why it was so unexpected, they had been really good friends after all. Yet this little visit had made big changes in everything.
He had took great time doing every little piece of house work assuring it was perfect as it should be, choosing every bottle of any soft or alcoholic drink, shaving as carefully as he could, choosing the right aftershave, deciding what to wear, and putting on the right music to help him calm down. She had come, they had spent a friendly comfortable evening together, she had looked prettier than ever, he had tried not to look sad or desperate. She had asked him not to hurt himself, he had tried to explain to her what he himself could not understand neither could he describe, in the end he had told her for the first time what his job really had been and how it had taken him great courage and effort to resign, yet not mentioning a word about the argument which had finally convinced his boss or the fact that he might be suspected of betrayal any time.
She had not said much, she had kept silent, looking - or trying to look - not surprised, but yet troubled. He had felt more at ease to know that switching to his job, the previous subject might have already been changes, forgotten and would not be mentioned again.
As it had already been too late he had offered her to stay over for the night - which to him had much more sounded like begging her to stay - what she would have done had it been two or three months ago, yet she refused this time saying there was some work awaiting her back home and had left, leaving him alone to the cruel, tormenting night.
He could not realize where the pain was coming from, he could just feel the shakings of the coughs. But he was still conscious enough to see and recognize his mother’s heavy and angry look. A look of a mature woman being protective of someone she loves. He could now, in this one single look, treasure all she had gone through for him to benefit the life he had. It had definitely not been easy for people like his parents to bring up children such as him and his two younger sisters, even though his sisters were not as difficult as he had been; they were also women, he thought. He had always had the general impression that women had the potential of making less mistakes - when it came to huge and fatal ones - than men, that they were stronger and more consequent probably due to the fact that they were exposed to more and greater pain, difficulties, brutality and unjust than men. He knew he had always been the weakest in his family, even compared with his father. There were moments when the strength of his sisters and his mother had presented him with a kind of power he had not known of, and now, coughing his life up looking into his mother’s eyes, was one of these unique moments. He felt the pleasant warmth of something growing inside him, something which said he could carry on with his life, something which believed that it was not over yet, that there was still life and hope inside him.
There was just a vague smile on his face as his mother said: “Don’t you even dare thinking I’d let any child of mine die for someone they do not even know if they love!”
He felt as if being reborn is his mother’s eyes as well as in the sound of her words. He now had a new life to live.