These are my thoughts on waiting for things to get better and for people to return.
I think that having this hope is worth it all and allows for every possible emotion to take over and keep it up.
It is very fragile, and always connected to fearing an outcome too painful to truly be imagined.
My witch and I explored these moments in her life together.
She had hoped for him to return, as he had done the first time after being called to do his dark duty to the world.
The house in which she waited for him was full of memories of a time when they were sitting by the fire, slept in this bed together, and were sometimes simply sharing silence.
She would forever remember this as the days that she had lived for.
And she wanted to live again.
A long and cold winter, she was waiting.
Every evening, she stood by the window and cast hopeful views outside, searching the snowstorm at the horizon for a silhouette to emerge.
As the days grew longer, she was still waiting.
She was remembering him.
He was a shadow just like her.
He did not fully exist in the real world, in which she had once been a daughter, a sister and even a wife to someone.
He had saved her when darkness had torn that life apart, and had given her a second chance.
Another attempt to make sense of existing in a body so bloody and fragile.
While waiting for him to return, she sometimes became afraid that this day might never come. She did not want an answer to this, yet.
She wanted to keep her hope.
Wishing for an answer, knowing the outcome of this could mean accepting that he might not return and she could not allow that thought. Whenever it occurred, her body and soul fell into darkness for a moment. In one of those moments, she dropped a pot, and while cleaning it up did not care enough for the shards finding their way into her skin.
The plague doctor had to return.
Every evening she was standing by the window and staring into the distance while whispering her thoughts to the world, to God, or to whoever might be listening.
She did so when snow covered the world up to the horizon, and when the first leaves grew on the bare trees next to her house. Also, when they were full and green, she would not forget to end a day like this, and when autumn came, and the landscape would turn golden, before sunset she could be found holding on to this.
He had to return and greet her with a strange fruit from a distant land, as he had done the last time.
Another outcome she would never accept.
After staring outside the window and keeping these thoughts up, she could almost sleep peacefully, because she had done everything she could in cause to be seeing him again.
One day, there was someone appearing at the horizon.
After another long day of dwelling in memories and sending hopeful thoughts out into the world, there was a figure appearing on the hills slowly turning golden.
She forgot to breathe and her mouth felt dry.
Excited she ran downstairs, and then hesitated.
Was she ready to receive an answer, yet?
He had to return.
Her feet carried her outside, over the meadow and onto the hill.
Hopes were rising so high that she felt sick.
And when the figure came closer, her heart stopped for a moment.
It was not him!
She stumbled backwards, not ready to receive this answer to all her hopeful thoughts.
It was not him!
It was the boy that he had taken with him, to pass his wisdom on to.
She wanted to turn away and run from him.
She would rather hope for the plague doctor to return forever than accepting this.
But the boy came to her and handed her his coat, his face ashen and displaying a horror that she knew too well.
The plague doctor‘s coat.
The coat that he had given to her after freeing her from her prison.
She buried her face in the fabric that was the last thing in this world to ever touch him, and something inside her fell apart.
Something that survived when her family had died.
Something that had sustained torture and waiting to be burned as a witch.
Something that had been bleeding with every child that she had buried, but had been healed by him.
It was broken from now, because she could not hope for him to return anymore.
She was not hoping anymore.
Mistress witch writes 