On a high

She was beautiful- stunning, as he would tell her all the time. She was as stunning as ever but all that he could see was flickers of light with a faded image of hers in the frame. He tried to recreate her face in the haze but could not. The more he tried to open his eyes, the less he actually could.

She said a few words that he could not comprehend. He was not sure if he was trying to listen to her or was ignoring her altogether. His tryst with reading her lips proved futile. Since there was utter silence around, her words seemed to bang against his ears so loudly that they were deafening him.

Just when he thought the world around him was about to go blank, he thought he saw droplets of light fall from her eyes. On any other day, he would have jumped to wipe the tears off but today he could not move a muscle. He watched her cry and did nothing.

Then he saw her moving away. It was an illusion, he thought intially. But, it was not. She never came back. He waited for a few moments to catch her view again but then he could not defeat the weight of his eyelids. When he managed to open his eyes, he saw a ring lying on the table- the same ring that he had given her asking for her love, long time back.

The most important chapter of his life had closed right in front of him, while he was still on a high.

 

At this point...

Here I stand. In front of me is the never ending ceiling of the blue sky meeting the blue water of the sea, somewhere beyond the boundary of my vision. As I look back, I see my footprints on the sand tracing my journey back to eternity. Maybe something is missing. While I had always dreamt of reaching here, I don't feel that sense of completion. Neither do I see any road ahead that I can continue to tread on. So, this is it. Maybe my calculations were wrong. Reaching nothingness is actually the end of this journey.

I cannot go back. Neither do I have the energy nor do I remember the labyrinth of roads I had to unriddle to reach here. I am certainly standing at the point of no return. Since I have realized how this story is going to end, I wouldn't contest fate and make the last chapter of my story unnecessarily ugly. I would rather stand here and close my eyes, making the beauty of the blue my last recorded memory.

Premika

Dear, please don't get upset for I have made you the antagonist in the cycle of events. A married woman must be harsh on her past sometimes. Unless she denies her past, her present may become poisonous. My husband wishes to be the protagonist of my story. It is his inspiration that has made me take an attempt to write this epic. Even before I have written a word, he has set the stage for the best possible critique. Any inclination towards the truth will only bring havoc to my life. Therefore, please forgive me. I am his now. I cannot deny him his wish of becoming the hero of my story. You are nobody in my life today.What you think about me does't matter to me anymore.

But, I don't understand how would I even start writing. I feel my thoughts and feelings are entangled, like a messy spider's web. Which colour to apply on which portion of which picture to give him a hero's appearance and deface you, is what I am unable to decide. Even when I think of disfiguring you on the canvas, the splatter of the paint blackens my face too.

This is every artist's dilemma, maybe. If truth is what they not create, it would be a creation without a soul. If the artist doesn't look at the truth inside him but at the face of his inspiration, every picture would appear to be flawed, and every creation, fake.

(Original- Premika by Bibhuti Patnaik, Page 82-83. Premika is a critically acclaimed Oriya novel that tells a story about love, loss and repentance.)

The Black Rose

Fucking weeds. Just when the flowers were to bloom, they showed up in the garden-right under the plants he had been watering all along. He had spent days together plucking them out but the weeds knew some sort of trick, he thought. Every time he would finish cleaning them up, they would reappear at the same place. There was this one time when  he was cleaning the weeds, a pruning saw ran through his fingernails, accidentally. As blood was dripping onto the plant, he just wished it made the roses turn a shade redder. Silly him.


One fine morning he got this brilliant idea. He should probably burn the weeds to death-once for all. Trying to protect the roses, he decided to take care of a small section at a time. He lit the fire and zap came a gust of wind, like it was hiding somewhere waiting to come out at that moment. The plant was on fire. Moments later he saw the roses shrinking with the fire creeping slowly onto the petals. The roses were changing colour. They were not red anymore. In the fire and smoke, he saw something he had never seen before- a bunch of black roses.

The room of lost love.

The balcony door still doesn’t close. When the evening breeze slips through it, the curtains acknowledge it with a flutter. They create a tide of sorts, imitating the sea. As dawn creeps in, everything becomes still- except the dust specks seen in the sunlight coming through the door.

The sound of the sea. the sound of birds flying near the beach. The sound of the tides hitting the shore. The sound that once reverberated in the house. Today, the closed windows separate the sound from the silence in the room.

The candle on the corner the house- witness to smiles, tears, laughter, passion, jealousy, abuses and wounds. Once the lights would deliberately be switched off to make way for the candle light to mellow the air. Trying to figure out the words each other’s eyes spoke when they could hardly see each other is what filled the air with love.

The uncorked bottle of wine on the table, and the two glasses. The glasses were used for sure. Haven’t been washed, maybe. There is still some wine left in one of them. Maybe he hasn’t noticed it yet. Or, maybe, he has just deliberately left it untouched.

Sometime back love bloomed here, everyday. But then, hearts broke. And, like a souvenir, the broken glass on the window pane still stands there. Broken pieces still not picked up from the floor.