LOVE: To Infinity And Beyond

*SEA*

Dearest Readers,

I'll begin with wishing you all - my extended fam - a very happy Raksha Bandhan. May you all stay safe from all the hatred all around.

Now, this is a random piece I wrote this afternoon, inspired by the poem 'Break, Break, Break' by Alfred Tennyson, that we were reading the other day in class. Since, I keep writing about immortal couples and eternal happy endings, once I wrote it, I thought, why not share a glimpse of the harsh reality of mortal love stories with you lovelies.

So, here I am, after a lot of deliberation, posting a short story that's hardly related to anything that I've ever written in this book before. I currently don't have any ideas or plans of expanding this into a book.

I hope you feel it...

~With love and gratitude (for 145K reads on this book and for always being there),
Bristi ❤️

________

She stood at the beach; the sand soft, warm and welcoming beneath her feet. The sun glittered off of the wet sand as soon as one wave retreated, and proceeded to glint blindingly against the next splash of salt-water. The world around her moved in an excruciatingly slow pace. It was annoying and infuriating - agonizingly so.

Flashes of cherished days at the beach played like a quickened reel in her mind's eye; and each scene left her breaths coming in deeper drags. It was torture at its sweetest and pleasure at its bitterest.

She remembered the same sun glittering on the stray sand on his feet and tanning his back. It was the sound of his voice and his laughter - and not the ruthless breeze that whipped strands of her hair onto her face - that rendered her dead to the fragments of noises that came floating from the faraway crowds of the very East.

Although, she was almost sufficiently away from them.

Despair rose in her, stronger than ever before, as soon as the sound of the crowd's laughter intermingled with the sounds of his laughter. She walked further West, towards the endless expanses of vacant shoreline.

She barely felt a sharp fragment of shell piercing her sole hard enough to draw blood, and stopped only once she could no longer hear anything but his voice and laughter.

She stared at the sea. She hated this endless expanse of water with every last molecule of her being. It had snatched every semblance of love, hope, peace, happiness or contentment that life had gifted her in the form of him, from her.

And yet, here she was again. In front of the sea that she loathed with her all. But today, she wasn't here to scream a string of profanities dripping with grievous contempt at the sinister waves.

Today, she was here for love.

She remembered him explaining to her how the unending cycle of the crashing waved symbolised the unending cycle of life and death. She closed her eyes and saw his dimpled grin as the warm salty water immersed her feet.

She watched the scene of him on one knee, in this very beach - the moonlight making the solitaire between his thumb and his index finger shimmer with new hopes and dreams - as she took a few more steps, till the water touched her waist.

The sand shifted away from beneath her feet and she could feel the cool metallic weight of the ring on her finger reduce as the water traced up her torso, past her clenched hands in front of her chest, all the way to her neck; and then higher up.

She didn't feel the burn of the salt-water flooding her ears - only a heavy tranquillity - as the laughter and shouts of the outer world permanently vanished and all she was left with, were his voice and his laughter and his dimpled grin.

_______

[[DATE : 11/08/2022; WORD COUNT : 649]]