The Empty Side of the Bed

“Sometimes you wake up reaching for someone, and the space where they should be feels colder than any nightmare.”

I was dreaming.

I knew I was dreaming because everything was gold. The whole world had turned the colour of honey, of afternoon sunlight, of Gloria's hair when the light caught it just right. There were no walls here, no ceiling, no machines with their constant beeping. Just endless fields stretching out in every direction, grass swaying in a breeze that smelled like summer and growing things and something sweet that might have been flowers or might have been happiness itself.

Gloria was running ahead of me.

Her hair flew out behind her like a flag, like a banner, like something triumphant. Her hospital gown was gone—she was wearing a white dress instead, the kind girls wore in picture books about fairies and princesses, and her feet were bare in the grass. She kept looking back over her shoulder, laughing that laugh of hers, the one that made everything feel lighter and brighter and more alive.

"Come on, Luke!" Her voice carried back to me on the warm breeze. "You're so slow!"

I was running too, or trying to. My legs pumped beneath me, my arms swung at my sides, but somehow I couldn't close the distance between us. The grass whispered against my ankles—no hospital socks here, no cold tile floors, just the soft tickle of green things growing. I could feel the sun on my skin, warm and real, heating my face and my arms and the top of my head. I'd forgotten what the sun felt like. I'd forgotten what outside felt like.

"Wait for me!" I called, but the words came out strange, stretched and distorted like sounds underwater.

Gloria laughed again. She was further away now—had she always been that far?—but I could still see her face when she turned. Still see those bright eyes, that wide smile, that look of pure joy that made her seem like she belonged here in this golden world more than she'd ever belonged in the grey-white corridors of the hospital.

"I'll always wait for you," she said. Or I thought she said. The words didn't quite match the movement of her lips, arriving in my ears a moment too late, like an echo of something that had already happened. "But you have to keep running, Luke. You have to promise."

"I promise," I tried to say, but my mouth felt full of cotton, full of sleep, and the words wouldn't come out right.

Something changed.

The sunlight flickered—just for a moment, just a brief stutter like a lamp with a loose connection—and when it came back, it was different. Thinner. Less golden, more white. The kind of light that came through hospital windows, filtered and sterile.

Gloria was still running, but she wasn't touching the ground anymore.

I noticed it slowly, the way you notice things in dreams, without surprise or alarm. Her bare feet had lifted from the grass, just an inch at first, then more. She was floating upward, drifting, her white dress billowing around her like she was underwater or in space or somewhere else entirely.

"Gloria?" My voice came out small. Lost.

She turned back to look at me, and she was still smiling, but it was a different kind of smile now. Softer. Sadder. The kind of smile adults gave you when they knew something you didn't, when they were about to tell you something you didn't want to hear.

"It's alright, Luke," she said, and her voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, filling the golden world like music, like the songs from her Walkman. "Everything's going to be alright."

"Where are you going?"

But she was rising faster now, lifting up through the air like a balloon someone had let go of, like the balloons I'd watched from the hospital window floating up and up and up until they disappeared. The white dress spread out around her, and I thought I saw—just for a moment—something else spreading too. Wings, maybe. Or light. Or something I didn't have a word for.

"Don't forget me," she called down, and she was high now, so high, shrinking against the too-bright sky. "Promise you won't forget me, Luke."

"I won't," I tried to say. "I promise, I won't—"

But the words stuck in my throat, thick and heavy, and the golden field was going dark around the edges, the grass fading from green to grey to something that looked like hospital sheets, and Gloria was becoming part of the light itself, dissolving into brightness, becoming—

The mattress shifted.

Not in the dream. In the real world, the waking world, the world I'd left behind when I'd fallen asleep in Gloria's arms. I felt it through the fog of sleep—a change in the surface beneath me, a redistribution of weight, as if someone was moving carefully beside me.

I made a sound. Not a word, just a small noise of confusion, of half-waking. My hand reached out automatically, searching for the warmth that should have been there, the solid presence of Gloria's body.

The sheets were still warm. Just barely. The heat was fading even as my fingers touched them, leaching away into the cool air of the hospital room.

"Gloria?" I mumbled. The word was thick, slurred, caught somewhere between dream and waking. My eyes wouldn't open properly—the lids felt like they were weighted down with stones.

There was a presence in the room. I could feel it without seeing it—someone standing nearby, someone who was trying to be quiet, trying not to wake me. The air had a different quality to it, the particular stillness that came when someone was holding their breath, moving with careful, deliberate steps.

A hand touched my forehead.

Not Gloria's hand—Gloria's hands were small and cool and always slightly restless, fingers tapping out rhythms only she could hear. This hand was larger, warmer, steadier. Familiar in a different way. A checking hand, a caring hand, a hand that had touched my forehead many times before to feel for fever, to smooth back hair, to offer silent comfort.

"It's alright, Luke." The voice was barely a whisper, so quiet I couldn't tell if it was real or part of the fading dream. It sounded sad. Deeply, terribly sad, weighted down with something too heavy for words. "Go back to sleep."

In my dream—or was it still a dream?—Gloria was floating higher, becoming brighter, waving goodbye with a hand that was starting to glow. I reached for her, tried to call out to her, but my arm felt like lead and my voice wouldn't work and she was so far away now, too far, disappearing into light that looked like clouds that looked like wings that looked like—

Movement.

The presence beside me shifted, and I felt something else—a lifting sensation, the mattress rising as weight was removed from it. Not my weight. Someone else's weight. Someone who had been lying next to me, pressed against my side, arm wrapped around me, heart beating against my ear.

Gloria's weight.

I made another sound, a small wordless protest, my sleeping mind registering loss without understanding it. My hand searched across the cooling sheets, fingers grasping at warmth that was no longer there.

"Gloria..." The name came out broken, barely a whisper.

Footsteps. Soft, careful, the footsteps of someone who was used to moving through hospital rooms without waking patients. The rustle of fabric—a white coat, maybe, or sheets being adjusted. A small sound that might have been a sigh or might have been a sob suppressed.

And then another sound, one that didn't fit, that didn't belong. A sound like something being lifted. Like someone being cradled. Like a body being gathered up with infinite care, infinite gentleness, as if it was the most precious and fragile thing in the world.

I tried to open my eyes. I tried so hard. But sleep had me in its grip, pulling me down, dragging me back into the golden field that wasn't golden anymore. The grass was grey now. The sky was the colour of hospital ceilings. And Gloria—

Gloria was gone.

Not floating above me anymore. Not waving goodbye from the clouds. Just... gone. The field was empty. The world was empty. I was standing alone in an endless expanse of grey-green nothing, and the silence was so complete it roared in my ears like the ocean, like blood, like all the things you hear when there's nothing left to hear.

The door made a sound.

Soft. The whisper of hinges that needed oiling. The gentle click of a latch catching. Such a small sound, barely audible, the kind of sound you'd never notice unless you were listening for it.

I was listening for it.

Even in my half-sleep, even in the fog between dreaming and waking, some part of me was listening. Some part of me knew that the click of that door meant something. That the footsteps moving away down the corridor meant something. That the empty space beside me, the cooling sheets, the absent warmth where Gloria should have been—all of it meant something.

Something terrible. Something I couldn't look at directly, couldn't understand, couldn't let myself know.

"Gloria?" I whispered one more time. My voice sounded strange in the empty room. Small and lost and young.

No answer. Just the silence. Just the soft hum of machines that I'd learned to ignore, the constant baseline of hospital life. Machines that were beeping normally now, regularly, doing whatever machines did when there was nothing wrong, no alarms, no emergencies.

But somewhere else in the hospital—not far, not far at all—other machines were beeping differently. Urgently. The sound was muffled by walls and doors and distance, but it was there, threading through the edges of my awareness like something dark weaving through a dream.

I didn't want to hear it.

I pulled my hand back from the empty space on the mattress, curled it against my chest, tucked myself into a ball against a cold that seemed to come from inside me rather than the room. The sheets still smelled like Gloria—artificial peach, that chemical sweetness of shampoo mixed with something underneath that was just her. I breathed it in, trying to hold onto it, trying to keep her close even though some part of me already knew she was getting further away with every passing second.

Sleep pulled me back down.

But it was different now. The dreams were darker, heavier, filled with shadows that hadn't been there before. Gloria was still in them sometimes—I'd catch glimpses of her at the edges of my vision, always moving away, always just out of reach. Her white dress. Her golden-brown hair. That laugh I loved so much, getting fainter and fainter until it was just an echo of an echo of a memory.

I chased her through corridors that looked like hospital hallways but stretched on forever, doors that opened onto nothing, rooms that were empty no matter how many I searched. I called her name until my throat hurt, until my voice gave out, until the only sound was my footsteps echoing on floors that seemed to go on without end.

Wait for me, I tried to say. You promised you'd wait for me.

But she couldn't hear me. Or maybe she could, and she was trying to wait, trying to stay, but something was pulling her away. Something stronger than promises, stronger than friendship, stronger than all the love in the world.

In one dream—or maybe it was the same dream, just a different part—she stopped running. Turned to face me. She was glowing again, bright as the sun she'd been floating toward, and I had to squint to look at her. Her face was calm. Peaceful. Like all the pain and tiredness and fighting had finally let her go.

"I have to leave now, Luke," she said, and her voice was gentle, so gentle it hurt. "But I'll always be with you. You know that, right? Wherever you go, whatever happens, part of me will always be there."

"Don't go," I begged. "Please don't go."

"I don't have a choice." She smiled, and even in the dream I could see the tears on her face, glittering like stars. "But you do. You have so many choices, Luke. So many things to do, so many questions to answer. You promised me, remember? You promised you'd keep asking. Keep fighting. Keep being brave."

"I can't do it without you."

"Yes, you can." Her voice was fierce now, the Gloria I knew, the Gloria who raced wheelchairs and smuggled chocolate biscuits and faced down nurses twice her size. "You can do anything, Luke. You're stronger than you know. Stronger than anyone knows. And someday, when you've figured it all out, when you've found all the answers—we'll run through those golden fields together again. I promise."

She reached out and touched my face. Her fingers were warm, solid, real in a way that dreams weren't supposed to be. I closed my eyes against the brightness of her, leaned into her touch, trying to memorise it, trying to hold onto it.

"I love you, Luke," she whispered. "Don't ever forget that."

And then she was gone.

Somewhere in the hospital, a woman was crying.

The sound drifted through walls and corridors, muffled but unmistakable. Deep, gut-wrenching sobs that seemed to come from somewhere below the bones, somewhere where the really big grief lived. I heard it through my sleep, wove it into my dreams, turned it into wind howling through the empty golden fields, into rain that fell and fell and wouldn't stop.

Somewhere, voices were speaking in low, serious tones. The particular pitch and rhythm of doctors and nurses when things had gone wrong, when there was nothing more to be done. Words I couldn't quite hear, couldn't quite understand, but that carried weight even without meaning.

Somewhere, footsteps moved quickly through corridors. Doors opened and closed. Equipment was wheeled from one place to another. The hospital was waking up, responding to something, mobilising around an event that had already happened while I slept.

But in my room, there was only silence.

Silence, and the faint tinny sound of music bleeding from abandoned earphones.

I stirred, surfacing briefly from the dark waters of sleep, and my hand reached out again automatically. Still searching. Still hoping. Still not quite believing that the warm presence that had been there when I fell asleep wouldn't be there when I reached for it.

The sheets were cold now. Completely cold. Whatever warmth Gloria had left behind had faded while I dreamed, leached away into the air, become nothing but a memory of a sensation.

I pulled my hand back. Curled tighter into myself. My body knew something my mind wasn't ready to accept, and it was protecting me the only way it knew how—by keeping me asleep, keeping me under, keeping me away from a reality that would be too big and too terrible to face.

On the bedside table beside Gloria's empty bed, her Walkman continued to play.

The batteries were still good. The tape was still turning. Jimmy Barnes's rough voice growled through the earphones that lay on the pillow where her head should have been, singing songs about love and loss and all the things that hurt too much to say out loud.

The music played on and on, filling the empty room with sound, with feeling, with life that wasn't there anymore. Songs Gloria had listened to hundreds of times, songs she'd shared with me that afternoon, songs that would never sound the same again.

And I slept on.

Curled into a ball on the edge of her bed, my face wet with tears I didn't know I was crying. Lost in dreams where golden fields turned grey and the only friend I'd ever had floated up and up and up, becoming light, becoming air, becoming something beautiful and terrible that I couldn't follow.

Somewhere in those dreams, I heard her voice one last time.

Don't forget me, Luke. Don't ever forget me.