ShrinkingUniverse

It’s a parallel universe, and it seems so far away.
It’s a parallel universe, and we’ll meet somewhere half way.

She watches the ocean eating up everything.
She hates it. She hates how it takes away everything, how it swallows sand and stones. It’s so hungry and cruel. It erases the world, it consumes it. She hates even how it brings back his scraps to the surface, dead fish and crab’s skeletons. The salt that makes her eyes water up and burns on open wounds.

She hates this place, but every year somehow she finds herself in Norway.

Sometimes she takes Tony with her, he loves the beach like every kid of his age is supposed to do.
She let him slip away from her hand and watches him run on the shore-line, he tries to catch up the waves, to immobilize them underneath his little red gum-boots. “Watch me, Rose!” he yells at her. And he laughs loudly through all those teasing salty squirts, while the ocean slips away from his feets, rebelliously and elusively. It’s the same ocean that took away everything from her, that made her feel empty and fragile and lost. And heartbroken. And she still can recognise the exact point, the one where he faded away, she still can’t help but looking for his face, his sentence still hanging in the air, incomplete. And she closes her eyes and tries to feel him through all the universes. She feels like and idiot most of the times. And sometimes instead it’s like he’s really there too, in the same place at the same time, just 93 universes away. She counted them all while she crossed them one by one, void by void. But maybe she just wants to believe it, she needs to believe it. And she wonders if he’s changed, if there’s a new version of him, with different cravings and different eyes and a different voice, maybe a little bit less rude and without an absolute and silly devotion for ball-bearings that you can eat, but that still hides an unberable pain, that pain that causes him horrible nightmares made of blood and wars, that pain he keeps running away from, playing hide and seek through time and space. The pain that used to leave a shadow on the back of his eyes, she remembers how desperately she tried to light it up, and sometimes she succeeded and those were the best times. The ones when it was just them, the Doctor and Rose Tyler. Nothing else mattered. Their mouths filled with chips and laughters and their hands entwined. There’s me.
She finds herself stroking one of her palms, she hopes he’s not alone. A little shiny tear streams down her cheek, and she still feels like a part of her is missing, that part of her has remained with him, it belongs to him, it always will.

“Rose, does the ocean end somewhere?”
Tony runs towards her, his messy blond hair disarranged by the wind. He’s got clever eyes that smile at life and hungrily try to discover the world.
She smiles at the horizon, “I hope so, Tony”