The graveyard

The graveyard

“…He looked at the moon and wondered if she was doing the same from the beyond and if they were sharing the same white moonlight. He looked at the constellations and somehow managed to locate her face even if the sky wasn’t clear that night. He stared at her pictures for hours and gazed into her eyes as if they were his mirror. She was all he could think of but he couldn’t for once say it out loud, because his lips did not deserve the touch of her name. He invariably denied it but he knew there were not enough words in the languages of this world that could define his urge to be where she was. He saw the night sky turn orange but the sunrise didn’t fascinate him. His sun had set and it would never rise again. He looked at his hands and the gaps between his fingers felt numb as they missed the warmth of her fingers. A tear rolled down his eyes as he recalled their first kiss and he felt as empty as never before. Coldness chilled him as he relived the moment when she hugged her tight for the first time and the tear landed on the frame that contained his world. The world he lost to destiny, the world he lost to lust, the world he lost to dishonesty, and the world…he lost to himself. The world he assumed would exist forever.

“How could I do this…” he murmured.

He closed his eyes and all he could feel was selflessness and the fact that he has lost his purpose. He was dying to hear her voice but his heart was too deaf to listen. His eyes dried up soon enough as he wished to see her coming back. His evil eyes with a lost control. He kept mum when they said it was bound to happen and that no one can win over destiny. He kept mum when they said he would meet somebody else someday. He kept mum when they said she was weak. He kept mum when they said she did this to herself. He kept mum because he was yet to discover the expression that would describe the amount of guilt that his congested lungs filled in them.

“It was me!” he shouted.

 “Not her!” he cried.

He never spoke much again as he knew there was nobody who would listen to him as closely as she did, nobody who would feel his words like she did and stare at his lips and gaze into his eyes when he would tell her how much he loved her. ‘I love you’ he would say all those times she felt low. All those times he thought he was lying. He suddenly realised those were the only true words he ever spoke. He just realised she was the only girl he really loved.

He went home in the morning and felt alien to his own room. Somehow the darkness of the graveyard felt more homely now. He threw himself on the bed, the bed on which he wished to wake up one morning, looking at her sleeping right next to him and contemplate his life breathing through her lungs. He shut his eyes hard and stopped thinking about it as if punishing himself. He closed the windows and covered them with the curtains as he learnt how isolation felt. As he learnt how she would have felt all those times he took her for granted, all those times he prioritise someone else over her, all those times he left her alone. And the time he cheated on her. He fell flat and the ceiling seemed to be farther away than usual. He closed his eyes wishing he never had to open them again. He choked again and again before he finally lied there as numb as a log of wood. He couldn’t sleep and neither could he be awake to live in the world devoid of her. He finally let it go and the tears his eyes were bearing all this while fled like a violent river. ‘Come back’ he said, wishing she never died. ‘Come back’ he said, knowing she was better off without him. ‘Come back…’ he said, ‘Come back and kill me instead.’ …”

There are a lot of questions we all really need to ask ourselves, few of them being… “Why do we cheat?” Do we even mean it anymore when we tell someone that … “Hey, I love you”? And why has ‘Breaking hearts’ become a sport? Is human affection so cheap? And have we really become so cold?

We do not understand that when we tangle someone with mutual emotions we must know exactly what is happening. We must realise that the direction we choose to go from there on has to be mutual too. And if we are not yet ready for that, then we must make it clear at the correct time. There are no passive voices or symbolic statements in this area of personal values. It is straight as it sounds. Why would we play with emotions? This world as we see right now is enveloped with the parasites of materialism, individualism and as orthodox as it sounds, selfishness. Love and compassion are being mistaken for weakness. I need all of us to take a moment and make it very clear in our minds that loyalty is the trait of the brave and dishonesty or carelessness, which now-a-days is tagged as ‘cool’, portray the lack of humanity and it is leading us no further than sorrow.

Let us all from now on make sure our attachments are filled of dignity and respect, because we never know what tossing true feelings might result into.

“A hand, he felt on his forehead.  And he felt her fingers wiping off his tears. He pictured her smiling face and he could finally rest his eyes. He felt her fingers in his and saw a long boulevard right in front of them. He didn’t know how but he saw her walking with him as he went into the conscious unconsciousness. There wasn’t much he knew about what was happening but what he knew for sure was that he never wanted to get back to reality if she was fake. That he never wanted to live, if she’s with him when he’s dead.”

-Akshat Vyas