Simps will see Dust

From the look in her eyes, I could tell that it was bad news. The expression on her face was disturbed and anxious. Her lips were half asunder as if she meant to speak; and she drew a breath, but it escaped in a sigh instead of a sentence. She raised her winsome eyes to mine and gave me a kind of solemn and distressed gaze that immediately sent tendrils of paranoia down my spine. My heart exploded into a frantic crescendo of beats that forced an embarrassing gasp out of me. The world around me had descended into the sadistic and stifling silence of a graveyard at midnight. I desperately searched for assurance in those dove eyes that seemed resolute on dashing and annihilating whatsoever form of equanimity I was struggling to evince.

Still, I was unable to understand how fast I had moved from detesting this angel of a person to desperately yearning for her in every second of my existence. The first day we met at our Anatomy Dissection Table, I loathed with perfect passion the sight of her imposing figure and the impressive mien of control she exuded. In contrast to her riveting poses and carefully worked out intonations that made her explanations astoundingly succinct and wonderfully apt, I hated how I would drone on incoherently while struggling to put together the scrappy and expatiate points in my argument. Her smile and graceful nods then were unsettling and would plunge me into an abasing abyss of discomfiture, as if to emphasize her own indubitable composure set against the backdrop of my pitiful confusion.

Even though I had expected her to be haughty and hubristic, her replies to questions from our table mates were kind and down-to-earth. She was witty and humorous in a manner that disarmed every soul that engaged her in a conversation and made it impossible not to love the salubrious and rejuvenating air she effortlessly infused into her surroundings.

“Henry,” she calmly called out to me one afternoon while I tried to clarify the difference between Crohn's Disease and Inflammatory Bowel Disease. I grunted something close to a reply as I tried to find sobriety at a moment that suddenly seemed so critical. Excepting her glossy hair that was usually held by a black velvet band with a spray of white pearls in front, she preferred to showcase her beauty au naturel, jilting all the overtly adorned features, outfits and elaborate ostentatious styling that was typical of the repulsively coquettish ladies in our class. I did not know for how long I had been lost in the heaven of such incomparable beauty until I had that sweet and familiar voice again.

“You agree with me, right?”

“Yes!” I whispered in my mind, unaware of what she meant. “I agree that I am in love with you!” I shouted silently as a sheepish smile spread over my face and drew the flabbergasted gazes of my colleagues.

For six years of Medical School I surrendered myself at the mercy of insatiable riptides of love and infatuation that lurked beneath the veneer of what seemed to be a placid demeanor. I saw Brenda return her adoration for me in furtive glances that lingered and brief smiles that became the highlight of my long, arduous and exerting days in Medical School. I was only starting to realize how wrong and blind I had been while I knelt before her, having voiced out a proposal that was not a little bit romantic as I had envisioned now that I was being roused to a horrible awakening of my unrequited love and the misery that would mark all my forthcoming days. She shook her head apologetically and I watched her lips settle in shape as I prepared myself to confirm her say the “NO” I dreaded hearing.

“Yes!” She enthused, “I will marry you Henry!” The heart-rending surprise at my sudden felicitous turn of fortune was enough to startle me out of the dream I had been having.

“Oh my goodness!” I gasped involuntarily as I sprang out of bed. When I realized I was an hour late for my Pathology end of year exam, I knew it wasn't Brenda's pretty face I was staring at but the unnerving grin of a Supplementary Exam.