With love, ~Part-1

14th February

“…My soul hangs from a nail. It smirks at its own non existence. Sense of being is worn to shreds… so depleted and raked of all purposes in life. Death is a horrifying stranger. She who comes in without a knock on the door. She who feigns benignity in her eyes, whispers in the ear some sweet words about eternity and robs us of our happiness. A cheat, who transforms life into a non living truth and fills one with only angst and fury towards everything that defines it.
Why should there be life if it were so obvious to die? Why should there be laughter if the only things it can lead to is pain and sorrow? Why should there be love if the only emotion that is accepted here, due to fear, pride, fanaticism or helplessness, is hatred?....”

A drop of tear tickled her nose. She wiped it with the back of her hand. Her heart still ached. Her head was still full of nagging memories that sprang up menacingly like cockroaches from under dusty old carton boxes. She sagged back into her chair and felt the wooden cupboard on her side. His shirts were still stacked neatly inside it. His towel still hung by a hook on the bathroom door. Some parts of the house still held the smell of his cologne. And in some corner of the house was hidden a faint hope, that knew it would never be able to face light of reality.

She quietly switched off her laptop and looked up at her undone bed. In other times, she would lie there, cuddled in his arms, hoping that moment to last forever. She pinched herself. No, this was not a nightmare.

It had been about two weeks since the mishap. And even now, she couldn’t sleep without pills that made her forget her own existence for a mere couple of hours. Even in an iota of consciousness, she couldn’t let her eyes close without the pictures of that gruesome day shaking her soul like an electric current.

In the deepest pit of her sleep, she would dream of a road filled with blood… small paper boats in yellow, green and blue being sucked into the hungry red liquid, capsizing helplessly. Suddenly a truck having lost its control would roll backwards dangerously from where the road inclined… and there would be a deafening sound with splinters of glass flying everywhere. The air fills up with a pregnant silence. There would then be a horrible sight of a man with a cracked spine on the driver’s seat and an excruciating sound of a woman weeping, in the background. The last word he spoke would resound… Anahita… Then she would hear a loud scream and find herself up in her bed with sweat all over her face and inside her palms.

He died that day.

And she died everyday.

Suddenly, the door bell rang and shook her out of her trance. It rang in a familiar rhythm - two rings with a knock that followed. She stopped breathing for a couple of seconds. It cant be. It was just as if…. No, she was certainly dreaming. But then she heard it again.

She sprang up from her chair, ran to the door and flung it open. There stood a bouquet of red tulips on her doorstep. There was no one else there. She jogged towards the lift, and saw a delivery man start his bike downstairs. She shouted with all the strength to ask him to stop, but in vain. The man didn’t seem to have heard. He drove outside the gate and vanished.

Her breath was heavy and fast. She quickly walked back towards her apartment in anticipation. The bouquet….