Where Parallels Meet

Chapter 11

(His POV)

I locked myself up in my room. Tonight, I was too tired to pray standing. I sat down, and recited an exceptionally long prayer.

A part of me looked at it all as if it was just a dream, a nightmare to be specific. As if it was all bound to end sooner or later, and I prayed, even after I had finished praying, that I woke up right away.

I remembered who I had turned to when the last time I felt this low. I almost dialed that number, but then, it hit me, all at once, like a million tons of universe that the number wasn't going to be at my disposal ever again.

I hoped the hoodie from two nights back still had her scent in it, but I was too tired to make use of it. There was just a dying rose kept standing, lifeless and plaintive in a water-bottle, that I stared unblinking at. I knew it wasn't the only thing dying tonight.

Red, it had been when she had offered it to me, peeking shyly out of her book, but now its grayness crawled towards me threatening to discolor everything.

Forever.

After one full day, the light outside slowly slithered in the darkness' embrace, and a peculiar kind of cold engulfed me.

I snuggled into myself, looking for the nonexistent body heat, after I went ramrod straight for a moment. The fan overhead was too much to suffer, but the prospect of switching it off was even worse.

I couldn't remember when was the last time I had actually talked to someone apart from her, about how I felt. It had been one full day, but for me it might just have been one week, or one hour in that room.

I thought I was eroding, wan and shivering all alone, with no one anywhere in sight to respond if I shrieked. I helplessly lowered my head to the knees, needing all of it to stop at once. I felt so much solid darkness around myself, that a bigger darkness, the ultimate one looked like the only way out.

Chills erupted all over my skin, when I dialed her number and the crass ring whirred next to my ears. I was not sure if calling her was the right decision, but it was the only decision in sight. I couldn't help it.

The phone ringed for an eternity before it wasn't ringing anymore. I manically called her as many times as the course of the night allowed. Each call got me a bit closer to hopelessness.

I had learnt one thing in life, that optimism, was just an illusion like a mirage in the middle of death, an oasis of life, and it was the pessimism, which was like a walkway of prickles, which you could spread thin through time, and walk along, while you still lived.

Pessimism was the very thing that had kept me sane like soothing darkness when the brightness of hope tried to blind me, and drown me in an endless ocean of despair. But I had, indeed made the same mistake once again. The mistake of expecting.

I had expected her to stay, for a forever which outlasted my time, which wrapped my eternity in one infinite hug. And here I was, next to the broken remains of my expectations, which drew blood as they cut into my skin.

I felt like I had never needed her more, like this was the very worst life could get, the very bottom I could hit. I knew not if I was right, but I knew there wasn't her to be blamed.

. . .