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Authors NOTE:

...So...Hi.  Here I am.  Years later.  I will continue with this story.  Chapters will be shorter but more frequent.  Happy to be back - I hope some of you are still with me!

The songs I used for this chapter are as follows:

Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again - from Phantom of the Opera

La La Lu - Lullaby - from Lady and the Tramp.  I totally encourage you to play this music as you read - set the stage as it were.  On with the story!

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Dead.  That's the only way to explain how I slept.  I was a dead man and my body felt like it weighed more than a house.

"...my one companion..."

A haunting melody gently pried me from my dream and back into reality.

"Wishing I could hear your voice again...knowing that I never would..."

Her voice was so sweet, so smooth, and so sad.  I remembered where I was and whom I was with.

"Too many years

Fighting back tears

Why can't the past just die?"

Tears pricked my eyes as her sorrowful song wound its way around my heart and pulled tight.  She was mourning.  She was saying goodbye.

Salina had known only sorrow for so long...and it made her voice unparalleled to any that I had ever heard before.  I cracked my eyes open - praying my changed state from asleep to awake would not alert her and cause her lovely voice to stop.

No longer in bed, Salina, frail and petite, sat on the ledge of the window of the room.  The soft morning breeze, lifting the soft, silvery, tendrils of her hair that fell down from the ponytail she had tied.  I opened my eyes wider, drinking in her image as the sun made her hair fairly glow in it's light.

"Wishing you were somehow here again...

Knowing we must say godbye.

Try to forgive...teach me to live.

Give me the strength to try!"

She sang with such feeling and such force - it was amazing that she had the strength left in her vocal chords after the way she had screamed and cried the night before...

"No more gazing across the wasted years...

Help me say goodbye..."

Her song finished with it's last haunting melody and a soft sigh followed.