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Prologue

Daniel

Sheringham

5th January 2018

Breathe.

Just breathe.

That was all I had to do. And yet it was impossible. Lying on the ground, the cold seeping through to my back and chest, I stared up at the sky. Unblinking. A sheet of nothingness stretching in all directions. Flat and smooth and devoid of anything I could identify with, devoid of anything I could latch hope onto. Just grey. I looked anyway, for something, anything that meant there was more. My eyes stung, I needed to blink. But I didn’t dare. I knew if I did, my eyes might not open again. And grey was better than the black of what was surely to come.

Ironically, grey was the colour that made up my past, made up who I was, made up my memories. I had fought against it, now, it was all I had left. The only thing to hold on to. Grey was a friend all along.

Breathe.

Just breathe.

The pain was too much, the knowledge of what was coming next too constricting. I knew I would pass out soon. I could feel it creeping up my arms and legs. A stillness as my extremities conceded defeat. The blood flowing from my body was unstoppable, it came from too many places. My life was leaking out, a millilitre at a time, forming a pool in which I lay. It warmed the concrete around me, inviting me to relax, to accept. And it didn’t hurt, it didn’t matter.

I wasn’t scared of what was next, part of me knew it was inevitable. It didn’t even matter where I went once I died, all that mattered was that life would continue. The storm would end, spring would come. Summer would burn and then winter would return. It would do so for many, many years. There would be laughter and love. There would be success and change. There would be children growing to become adults who would have their own children one day. Then there would be peace as it came to an end, only to be replaced with another winter, another summer for ever and ever.

I was just a very small part of a much bigger picture.

I was just a single paint brush stroke on a canvas that was the entire world. A single small stroke of paint. One that was never very vibrant or colourful. More shading than subject.

Just before I closed my eyes for the final time there was a small gap in the grey, just enough for me to see beyond it. A small space of the brightest blue I had ever seen. Pure. Untouched by the past five days.

And that bit of blue, it told me everything would be okay, for the one person that it was all for.

And that was what mattered.