"Broken Song"
~ Edward's Point of View ~
Her fragility is made more obvious by the hour, she weakens in front of me and I can't stop this! Each breath she takes sounds strained, painful, something as simple as breathing takes a toll on her when that should not happen. And it's so hard to just stand by not being able to do a damn thing!
This impasse we're in weakens me to an intolerable degree. Her suffering is my suffering and I feel completely debilitated by the pain. What she wants is madness! And all I want is for her to live, for if she dies my existence is over, my life is over. All I'm left with is wishing I could take all of it upon myself and not being able to.
I wish I could run, a part of me wishes to never have to see this, but I can't, and it wouldn't change anything, nor solve anything; I cannot allow myself to be selfish. And yet I am, I want her with me!
Does she know she's acting selfishly? That's surely what it feels like to me, that she's taking herself away from me, from all those who love her, and I can't bear it! Then again, never in all these years have I found someone so incapable of selfishness. So does it really count as that? She's sacrificing herself... for it.
~ & & & ~
She tries to take our minds from worrying as if this wasn't anything of consequence. While she's awake she is the one who's trying to make this easier on me. She keeps hiding and denying her own fears -she just won't admit to them, the stubborn creature that she is.
But for now, she sleeps, a restless sleep with shallow and irregular breaths.
She probably knows it too well, that this is a losing battle, but instead of self-preservation, she chooses that thing! She will persistently tell me she can make it, that she'll be fine.
While my eyes rest on her, my fingers tangle themselves in her hair, her beautiful mahogany hair...
A sigh escapes my mouth, and suddenly I feel her eyes on me, how long will she be awake this time? As if answering the question she drifts to sleep again, as quickly as she woke up. My eyes are locked on her, and I find it more unbelievable than ever, in all the time I know her, that even in these circumstances her love is boundless. How can I ever deserve her?
She's my light, my air, and my home. She is everything.
~ & & & ~
It is in these moments when the façade of calm I'm keeping slips a little when an apparently small moment of our past comes back to haunt me. At that moment, they were mere words, Bella's and mine.
Back then neither of us could have imagined this, then, it seemed such impossibility. Now it certainly feels as if being laughed at by the Fates. Something I wished with such intensity to be true, now I wish with all my might I could take back. The same thing that Bella never considered wanting, something she was turning her back on, only to keep me in her life.
A derisive laugh stops right at my lips before it becomes sound, life... And now she fights a losing battle to keep it, because of me.
Something we'd talked about the night before our wedding -apparently we didn't talk about it enough- flows back to me as clear as spring water.
"Do you remember when we told Charlie we were getting married? And he thought you were... pregnant?
"And he thought about shooting you," she paused and looked at me with a smile on her sweet face. "Admit it, for one second he honestly considered it."
I stood quiet, watching her face.
"What, Edward?"
Her heart rate increased and her voice went up a bit when I did not answer. Slowly I let myself say the words after a pause.
"I just wish... well, I wished that he'd been right." There I said it. My deepest secret wish. To which she gasped, then I continued.
"More that there was some way he could have been; that we had that kind of potential. I hate taking that away from you too." And I meant it. Heavens, how desperately I meant it.
Among other things, after she dismissed what I thought then -and her as well- an impossibility, I said that it wasn't an easy a sacrifice as she imagined, that it was not right -and I stressed the words on that; on how unfair that was- said that I didn't want her to have to make sacrifices for me; sacrifices that nonetheless she's being forced to endure now. I also said that I wanted to give her things and not take things away from her, that I didn't want to steal her future.
"You are my future," She said it to appease me And I believed her.
This conversation runs over and over in my mind, incessantly repeating itself and constantly torturing me. Not knowing that everything I said then would now cut as a blade -a double sided blade- that if I were able to bleed and if such thing were able to cut through my stone like the skin I'd surely be dead by now.
Well, Bella is pregnant. Who would have thought anything like this to be possible?
I said I hated taking that chance away from her... as it turns out, that was not true. But then because of what I am, she's being robbed of so much more. A thief, that's what I am! Taking away her life from her, I'm stealing her future! Precisely what I said I did not want to do. Her sacrifice; big as it would have been then; pales in comparison to her sacrifice now.
The worst of all is though, that despite all that is going on, to be completely and shamelessly honest, these days I've been faced between denying and accepting a deeply hidden part of me, a long buried wish of mine, a part of me that may have been allowed to wish what she wishes too. And that alone brings about way too many things my conscious self will not even begin to consider. There are way too many hidden emotions and feelings that for now I cannot, and will not let on to the surface. All this frightens me and reveals a part of me that I never knew was there, selfish wishes and dreams that I refuse to dwell on.
~ & & & ~