You met a guy, a foreigner, a couple of years ago. Got to know him, fell in love, and almost a year ago, he proposed. You said yes. A date was set, and now you counted the days.
He called you every day, you wrote encyclopaedic E-mails to him.
He sent you flowers and gifts, you sent back photographs and real, perfumed, letters.
Love was in the air, connecting two souls an ocean apart. You could hardly wait.
A New Year came, promises of everlasting love. Not even a month remained. Every date you crossed on the calendar seemed like a new feather to attach to your wings. Hello sweet romance!
And, finally, the last week came, and with it, the day he would board his plane to make an transoceanic flight, a quick stop on the capital, and then a hop across the sky to your city.
Hours pass, and kept passing. Only that, he never showed up.
It's now the early morning of the next day, and a phone call awakes you. He's in an hospital in the capital. He's also comatose.
The first seat on the first flight available is yours. You run next to him. Kiss his lips, hold his hand, stand by him. When you can't, you spend the night sitting on a couch, right next to his room.
The day you were supposed to become his wife you spend it guarding his immobile figure.
The days pass. Friends come and go. You haven't sleep for almost a week now, while the doctors tell you he's unconscious, but improving, he had a fever they barely contained, but he's alright, he might wake up tomorrow, he might wake up in hours, he will be awake soon.
And you keep your guard because you love this man. You love him, enough to wait till the end of time for him to wake up. A macabre sleeping beauty you kiss hoping against hope this will be it, what will breath life back to him.
And one morning, they tell you they are sorry. He's dead.
And that's how it ends.
Only that it doesn't.
Because the results of the autopsy roll in, and the coroner, a friend of your sister's husband, calls you in private, tells you to sit down, and continues telling you things.
Things like, someone had offered money to tamper with the results.
Things like, his body had pretty much fallen apart on the dissection table.
Things like, his cells had been pumped full of formaldehyde.
Things like, he hadn't been dead for a couple of hours when he got to the morgue.
Things like, he had been dead for almost a week.
The problem with those horror urban legends is not that they have some kind of basis in reality. The problem is that the real history might be more horrific than anything in the legend. The monsters are not horrible freaks. The monsters are human beings, just like you, who you cross on the aisle every day, who you trust your life, your love to. Who will smile at you, and tell you "Everything is going to be fine" at the same time they pump a dead man full of chemicals so that he would pretend to still be alive one more day.
Because every day in your hospital is worth enough money to, in a week, spirit away the life savings of a broken bride and her dead groom into the pockets of greedy doctors and nurses and managers.
Taking their souls at the same time, of course.
-- --- --
I wish I could tell you this story is just a product of my twisted mind, but it isn't. The bride is one of my most cherished friends, one to whom I own more that I could ever repay. I took her to the airport the morning of the call, I hold her while she was crying not knowing what would happen, and I stood with her at the door of her groom's room - only for some monsters to break her apart.
I only heard about the whole thing it a week ago. That's what was needed for her to fix herself enough. Enough. For she will never be able to heal completely. She has no hope left. No hope. For fucks sake, what are we, if we have no hope?
Really, what kind of person could be so rotten as to willingly play with and crush a woman's hope?
