One day, his wife returned home from work, to see that he was nowhere to be found (Oh, and her name was Mariane Mallory).
She called all of their friends, and none of them knew anything of his whereabouts. She called the police, and they started an investigation. They put up signs all over town.
She cried herself to sleep every night, and thought about everything that could have happened, her mind wouldn't leave her in peace. She should have seen something like this coming, she thought, as she turned in her bed yet again, trying to get some form of sleep.

The fantasies teased and taunted her, even in her dreams. Maybe this was all her fault, she thought, sullenly. She must not have been a good enough person.

Somewhere in the past nine years she had messed something up, and whatever she had done for her husband wasn't enough. She felt like nothing, so she gave herself nothing. She stopped eating, and she stopped doing anything that she thought mattered before. Probably because those things felt good.

... And Mariane didn't want to feel good. She wanted to feel empty. Emptiness was nothingness, so it was pure and simple, and it was easy. Pure, sweet, emptiness.

Mariane stared at what was supposedly her own reflection in the mirror, and barely recognized herself. Although her gray eyes shined like diamonds in the lamplight, they were sunken in, and she already felt sedated. She combed her dark, flat hair over to one side, hiding one side of her face, and kept it like that. Her clothes were all in dark colours now. She wanted to look like how she felt on the inside.

Some wretched months passed by, until one day she went searching the attic, trying to expect nothing. Cold was the winter in that month, and one of the few things that was missing from the house was his old winter coat. He must have taken it along with him on the fateful day in April.

She felt the cold floor beneath her feet. She put the coat over her shoulders, and pulled it tightly to her chest, her heart breaking with every step she was taking.

She soon found the note that he had planned for her to read. She clutched it in her sweaty, clammy, cold hands as her heart raced like an roller coaster of quintessential insanity, and her feet froze onto the attic floor below her. It was by all means his handwriting, she knew, and In very neat letters, it said that he had ended his life by running off a great height into cold water.

She blinked and stared back at the note, feeling the deepest cut to her heart, the greatest fear and panic she had ever experienced. She clasped her hands together as she begged God that she could have only misread it, possibly blinded by all her terror. It couldn't be... How could he be gone? There life together had been the only sense of belonging she had ever experienced in all the years of her dull life.

... but she hadn't misread it, she realized as her eyes widened like a lunatic, her hands still gripping each other as she screamed piercingly for not a soul to hear, and tears enveloped her white face like an endless waterfall of agony.

Everything had seemed so calm, and life had been relatively good to them, so why was this happening to her?

She didn't know how to handle herself at all anymore, as her head started to spin out of control, and her stomach felt like it was being torn and pulled up into her blocked-off throat... She wanted to disappear also. Maybe she could see her husband in heaven.

Breaking into the chaos, as voice began to speak to her saying, "...wouldn't it be sooo ironic... both sides of a couple gone in one year..."

This was a voice that Mariane had never heard before, yet it sounded so comforting.

"DON'T YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT IT MARIANE!," another voice broke in from the left side of the room, that of her mothers; "YOU'RE GOING TO HELL IF YOU TAKE YOUR OWN LIFE!", It pleaded with her, "IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?!?"

...Yet the other side of her would not discontinue its persistent advances;

"...how in the name of God could Hell be anything torturous compared to this life that you're already living, Mariane? ...Is this not Hell already? ...Are you not at the lowest depth?," the voice spoke softly from the right side of the room.

...she could do it, and it would all be over.

The right was winning.

Although it was all only a blur of suffering now, she had a vision of a hand on her left side... did it belong to her?

...the hand was now causing her see blood spill onto the now ocean-like attic floor. The hand that was making the temporal world begin to fade from her consciousness, as her body was beginning to drain of all life now. The hand that did nothing as the other used it's last breathe, it's last ounces of strength, and the last strength left in her left brain to dial a of number of salvation before he was all gone.

The last thing that she saw was the ceiling above her, and then the world surrounding her became a well of blackness.

.........................................................................................................................

CLIFF HANGER.

.........................................................................................................................