Evanescing The Facade

12. A Distant Dirge

"I fear I may have killed you a second time
With the ease of love wrapped in crudity of expectations,
Stabbing the fragility of an innocent heart.
I fear my hands are marred with your blood,
For the porcelain skin of your dreams have been scratched to vindictive words.
I fear I have trapped you in a loop,
Of promises I sung in poetries I write.
I fear the my words died brutally with my own hands,
And I have been hiding all this time- from the reality of rotten you and rotter me."

Silence is peace, silence is solitary but silence is also a different kind of death. Like the haunting absence of a mode of communication on a forlorn land, where souls seem evanescent and roads are empty, where movement is just the gust of wind, the wind that reminds you about the emptiness of the city embracing you. Silence can kill, when it comes with loneliness draped in poetic beliefs of unrequited love and verses of broken hearts. Loneliness is not an art, it eats you from within, even when surrounded by frolic and fiesta. It takes you in a place of its own, in depths of sorrows, where in silence, your head throbs with your own screams, where in chaos your heart aches with the cries you have swallowed for peace. Only if, every ounce of grief we have borne would have left a visible scar, we would have been more compassionate and empathetic towards the pain that each one of us carries in our eyes, within depths so unreachable. Then maybe, with the evidences of hurt, we might learn to acknowledge pain.

Abir Rajvansh has known this agonising feeling of loneliness, especially in those three months that he had spent away from Mishti, when his existence felt like a prison, until she came back. It hurt to see her with someone else, it hurt to see that he wasn't the one to make her smile or wipe her tears and all those feelings shrouded in angst took the worst possible turn and he kept hurting her more till he realised how wrong he has been, how life wasn't about finding comfort in sadness while the world was a misery to survive in, it was about taking pride in our little attempts at happiness. And he found his precious, he got his Mishti for a lifetime. But what for, for her to rot in silence while stayed in a bubble or for her to kill everything that made her just so tranquility in their delusional abode prevails? Only he knew how each word that the therapist said was shooting daggers at his heart and choking him with guilt.

"Mr. Rajvansh what was it about the pendant that made it so important for Mishti?", The therapist asked him, breaking his reverie.

"I..I gave it to her, on the day we confessed our love for each other."

"I am sure you must have gifted her a lot of things but there has to be something else too. Did you say something that was important to her?"

A small smile played on his lips, "it was a mirror, I asked her to look at her reflection and told her how she had the courage to face everything".

The therapist sighed, "it's so easy to understand Mr. Rajvansh. If you haven't noticed, Mishti's self esteem is an all time low. From everything you and her family has told me about, she blames herself for everything that goes wrong and it's not merely because she loves everybody and can't see them in pain but it's because she really thinks so low of herself. Back then, she came to be dependent on you, for you were someone who made her feel good about herself, you were someone who never reminded her where she came from, she used to draw her strength from your love and words."

His breath hitched for a moment and he fumbled to reply, " I.....I did remind her of her past, I used the same words against her when....I broke up with her. I called her paraayi, I said a lot of things about her not being good enough and then later on I hurt her more, blamed her for a few things, even said that I regretted loving her but I apologized, I really did. And she understood me, she always did." He bowed down his head in shame.