This is my first piece of #microfiction.
Hope you like it.

He sits bolt upright in bed. Eyes as wide as dinner plates. Body rigid and gasping for air as if he was drowning. The room was familiar, but strange at the same time. His eyes acclimatise and breathing slows. This was the home he and his wife had built, but his mind drifted elsewhere.

His children slept soundly in their beds, unaware of the pain he hid in his heart.

She was always there, but never present. He never knew who she was. The simple details escape him as the years pass by. In his dreams is where he remembers her.

The memories of that fateful night, still so vivid in the man's memory. So long ago, but so immediate in his unconscious.

His wife, jolted by his reaction reaches out to him. Her hand is gentle and reassuring , but she too, knows.

The ambulance sirens and flashing light. The front door swinging open. His fathers' panicked screams, directing the paramedics to the front bedroom and his sister, holding him tight and consoling him in his bed, telling him that everything was going to be alright.

It wasn't alright.

He didn't know that moment would shape him forever.

She wasn't coming back. He never knew her, and he would spend the rest of his life with a space in his heart that, no matter what he did, or whom he met, would ever be filled.