A love frozen out of reach

She was perfect. From the very start until the moment when I looked at her for the last time. Her eyes were pale green with a little shade of​ gray​ and reminded me of the mystery that was​ hidden deep in the forest. When she laughed, I could feel real happiness with a drop of bittersweet sadness. Felling of the grief before you lost someone. The way her heart used to love everybody so kindly keeps breaking my old soul. Her amazing looks could make me do anything, even if I couldn't. She was that one person who would be the first to help and the last to pull the trigger. I was so afraid that some horrifying people would try to use her pure soul for bad ideas. Maybe I was a bit harsh or strict because of that fear. But she was just a girl.

She was my everything.

She was my sunshine.

She was my daughter.

***

“Come on! We're almost there!” She kept trying to hold her long white dress with tiny sunflowers on it, even though running as fast as she could sounded better. Her laughter echoed like sweet music, filling the air with innocence and joy “Dad, you need to be faster.”

The little girl put her hands on her hips and looked at me with a silly severity in her eyes. She was copying her mom. That fact made me giggle because in that pose, she was more funny than dangerous.

“Okay, okay.” We were standing in the parking lot, passing cars and thinking about the fact that we don't have one. The massive building of the toy store looked at me with a little smirk. It felt like this "kids' paradise" was telling me "Hey, I'm going to be the end of your money!" A blue jeep that drove right in front of me pulled me out of the thick of my thoughts. “Give me your hand. There are a lot of cars, remember.”

“Sure.” She was still in her own mind, already enjoying hundreds of toys. Her blonde hair was a little messy because of the wind.

I stopped for a moment to think about one fact. It is my daughter. My princess, who deserves everything and all at once. Her crazy ideas always will sound fascinating to me, even if it is just an immature desire.

I love her.

The understanding of such a simple fact felt like a magical epiphany. All the things that I want to say and show to my beautiful girl were hiding behind those three simple words.

“I love you” My heart shattered for a moment like it was in some kind of cage. How can I possibly love someone so much?

"Love you too." Her tiny fingers touched my old hand and held it like it was the only rescue in the whole world. I could feel the softness of her skin. A smile began to appear on my face because it was a moment when I could sense happiness in my calloused palm. Suddenly, her hand started to slip out of mine. I looked at my daughter seriously, thinking that she was just joking around. The smile quickly faded as I saw it - the change in her skin, the deathly hue that spread from the point where my fingers had made contact. It was as if the life was draining out of her before my very eyes, leaving behind a cold, eerie resemblance to a lifeless corpse. This strange thing spread out her arm trying to reach her neck with bleached lines of a strange disease. I didn't know what to do. Hoping that my touch might somehow banish this malevolent force, I reached out to touch her forehead. The instant my fingers brushed her skin, the pallid specter spread its tendrils, defiling her innocence, casting a shadow over her youth. The terrifying thing started to grow right there. In the head of my little sunshine.

“No," the word slipped from my lips, a desperate prayer to some unseen deity.

No.

No.

No.

A futile protest against the merciless hands of destiny. Stupid denial of my helplessness and an awful terror. It went right through my own skin, making me feel cold sweat. “No,” each repetition a plea, a protest, a chant of denial against the cruel reality unraveling before me. My hands, once meant to nurture and shield, now clung to her fragile form, aching with the weight of her fading existence. She was slipping away, her pale green eyes no longer meeting mine, the life and vivacity in them replaced by an ethereal emptiness. There was only a ghost of her beautiful laugh.

Her kind heart stopped beating.

Her heart, the very heart that had mirrored my own in so many ways, had stilled. The world had lost a beacon of light, a source of unconditional love. In that moment, my soul shattered alongside the reality that had once been my daughter. The weight of helplessness and grief bore down upon me, suffocating me with a pain that defied words. The tragedy of a life stolen away, of a future erased, became a scar etched upon my heart - a scar that would forever remind me of the moment when I could do nothing but watch as death claimed her, and I was left clutching only memories and aching emptiness.

***

A rare disease where the touch of a sick person's skin against a healthy human's skin can trigger a chemical reaction that freezes another person. I mean literally freezing them, without any chance of survival. The extreme cold within the body effectively shuts down internal organs, ultimately leading to death. A freeze that offers no escape, a frozen fate that switches off life's spark deep within. It was as though the darkness was born from my own touch, from my own inability to protect her.

I lost my eight-year-old daughter because of a simple touch. What had once been a touch imbued with tenderness now seemed tainted, like a cursed seal that had been broken.

What remains is an emptiness, a permanent ache

-

A love frozen out of reach.

***

You died that night. And something died inside of me.

Now I wonder why the sun shines the same up in the sky.

Even though my sunshine is dead.