One Last Story

One Last Story

He told me one last story. He used his aged, ruined voice like an old man’s hands to pick the lock on his past...
I stared into his dull grey eyes as he spoke. His slouched body was laid in bed, propped up by dominating pillows behind him. It was obvious to one that upon seeing his appearance that he had not much beats left in his heart. He was a skeletal figure, a figure lost in the sheets of white. And the figure was my father.
***
He and I had never been close. Like many failed marriages, he had just packed his bags and left one day without a reason. Growing up as a child without a father, I adapted well to living without his presence. As an accomplished adult, I was living a happy life without knowing such man. As cold as it sounded, I had not cared much upon receiving the news that he was bedridden in hospital. I was not prepared to have him disturb the life I was happily living.
However it was Mother who had forced me to visit him for the first time a fair few weeks ago. She had received a phone call from his relatives, reporting of his unfortunate situation. ‘Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,’ they told her; otherwise known as AIDS.
‘Catch up time,’ she said cheerfully as she tried to persuade me to pay him a visit.
But as soon as had I lay my on him the first time at the hospital, I noticed the mistake she had made. For him, time could not be ‘caught’. Instead, time was gradually catching him – slowly being devoured and not willing to spat back out.  
I remembered vividly the day which I first placed my foot into the room. I felt empowered by its whiteness, blinding and artificial to my eyes. I saw his slumped figure in the bed. One would have thought that no life could be contained within the narrow frame of his until the notice of the slightest movement of rise and falls within the sheets. His breathe was the only confirmation of life. I had been staring at him as if he was a foreign object. The clean cut visage he once had was...