Berberis' World

As they drifted, so did she. As it passed, she did also. Slowly drifting through her day… week… month… year…

Lifetime. She who had once been so vital was now lethargic. She who had sought to save the lives of the smallest of the nearly living was now housebound. As caught behind the net curtains of her living room as was the wasp.

The wasp died, eventually. As would she. She knew this fact, and was largely content with it. But still there was regret, inside her, buried so very deeply… buried under almost seventy years of denial and sacrifice and service to others and regret and bitterness… hidden always behind a uniform; the black and white of a scullery maid, the grey and white of a nanny, the blue and blue and mauve and blue and white of the many disguises she’d nursed as a nurse… caring for the elderly, the children, the babies.

More than any of these, she loved, she missed the babies most of all; their vulnerability, their total dependence, their absolute love… their sweet little faces… which would come and go and change and develop… and shift and pass before her eyes like sand through her fingers.

Her time with endless babies was past. She had drifted through marriage, foundering on the uncertainty of her love for the man she had wed… swept up into hidden, forbidden passion with another… letting her hopes and dreams slip through her fingers as so much sand. With the passing of time came the departure of those she loved, the arrival of those she would love… but not, perhaps, as she would have wished.

Time would show her this. As it would shadow the movement away and back, the ebbing and flowing, of those she could have loved differently… as it dragged behind the one whose presence was immovable and, fatally, irresistible. The ever present presence, the always baby, the one who she had once admitted she would have allowed to drift past, had she known what she might have to watch pass by…

Turning from the enveloping net she moved her feet, and they moved slowly, as through sand.