Writer's Island Foretell

The prompt at Writer's Island this week is Foretell.

FORETELL

I can still feel the light behind me fading slowly, casting my shadow across the dining room table. I watched my mum move busily back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, clearing away the dishes… I watched her with a lazy pair of eyes that had seen it all before, many times. Seen it all before, still watching and waiting. All that was twenty five years ago, though I remember it all so clearly. I think I may possible have cleared my plate before I spoke, but it’s only a possibility.

“You know,” I remarked, “I’d be totally lost without my sight.”

Ziggy’s arm creaked slightly as I lent upon it, shifting my weight to get into a more comfortable position. My wheelchair is my friend now - Ziggy it’s called. I still watched my mum even though she had started to move back and forth between the rooms, her attention caught by my words. She dried her hands very slowly and carefully on the tea towel, taking a few tiny steps across the carpet towards me until she was standing right by me, almost leaning against Ziggy.

“Yes,” she agreed, “I think you would be.”

That was it, the sum total of our intimate conversation. But I’ve been thinking of it now, and it feels quite distant even though I remember it all so distinctly. I saw the light fading slowly, and I see it still, the light fading slowly away from me. It won’t ever be diminished completely. I don’t feel frightened any more, for all that has changed… the “I” has become dissipated, fragmented into multiple beings, some living, some dead. They are all me, different facets of me. I have become contained within each self, each being… and every one of them can both see and be seen.

And behind me the light still fades slowly, ever more slowly from the sky… and yet the darkness will never descend and smother me completely.