▪︎Some stories are just waiting for an ending.▪︎
A marriage set on shards of glass, every step forward makes someone bleed.
A troubled heroine, a lovesick hero, an emotional journey.
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A short love story.
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When I was little, my father used to tell me stories of fairies and angels. When I grew older, my mother used to tell me that I am an angel. Many did. They said it because they found me beautiful. They said I am not the regular beautiful but the angelic one. I had a baby face. I hated it. Because they treated me like a child because of it. But I grew out of it. I grew out of the beauty I once used to have. Pretty much like everything else.
I am not an angel. Far from it actually. I ruin lives. I've ruined mine and I'll be responsible for ruining many more. I was an average student coming from a middle class family. I had dreams. But they meant nothing. I was a student in London, drowning under the pressure of student loans when I got diagnosed with Schizophrenia. I always knew I wasn't normal, nothing ever seemed right to me but the nineteen year old me wasn't ready for the load of medical bills that came with my condition.
At first, that seemed to be my only problem. How the hell will I afford my sickness? But that became the least of my worries after I saw what it really meant to be Schizophrenic. I started seeing things that didn't exist. I became aggressive enough to be thrown out of two different offices. I took enough medication for it to be identified as my meal. My depression threw me into the deepest of pits, ones I could never get out of.
Eleven years I've been this way without an ounce of improvement. I hoped for it. I really hoped to get better so I could go back to India and see my parents. I haven't visited them in eleven years and I miss them. But they don't know who I am anymore. They don't know about my condition either. What they remember is the adorable little girl whom they called an angel. I am none of that anymore. I am a depressed adult who has a cloud of sadness around her. I haven't even been able to smile at my own reflection in years.
I don't like this city. London is as depressed as I am. There is very little sunshine around and it's always glum. Rains pour down more often than not and seem like acid touching my skin. But this is my life now. My work is here, my doctor and treatment is here, and lastly my life is here. A life I've tried more than once to take. Not intentionally, might I add.
I don't necessarily want to die, but the winters here chill my spine, creeping dark thoughts into my head, and my mind tells me the best thing to do now, is to leave everything behind and fly away to a place that doesn't has any of my troubles. Sounds easy, better and very tempting. But it's the cowards way. And I don't want to disappoint any more people than I already have.
My isolation brings me thoughts that shouldn't be there. My mind makes up stories that aren't real. But they seem so convincing. I always end up giving into the temptations of believing them. I sit on the barstool, stirring a very colorful drink. The bartender told me what it was. He definitely did. But I don't remember it.
The two people that sit beside me try to pull me in their conversation from time to time. It's unfortunate that I can't offer them more than a few nods. I don't exactly know what they are talking about either. These two ladies are my colleagues. I have worked in the same company for the last three and a half years. My longest run. People have been kind to me here.
They don't stay away from me because they think I am a weirdo. I wouldn't have blamed them if they did though. But I honestly wish that I didn't have to attend any of such office parties. No one really forces me to come here, I am just a mere accountant, not that important for people to pull me to parties or they won't have fun.
But I attend them. Because if I don't, he won't either. And he, he is the boss. If he doesn't attend, who will increase morale? My eyes flicker over the large sea of people until they land on him. Reyansh. Even though he is the boss, he is the only other Indian in the whole company beside me.
Devastatingly handsome, charming, kind. He is everything I never expected a man as rich as him to be. Sure he gets angry sometimes, but who doesn't? He is human afterall. But I am yet to see that anger directed at me. He is so very patient with me, it grates on my nerves. Why can't he say when he is annoyed? Why does he always look at me like I am the most important person in his world? Like I am his world?
He shouldn't. He shouldn't put me above him. Shouldn't put my happiness before his own. But he does it anyway. Next to him stands Lara. She says something and he laughs. I've never seen him laugh before. Smile? Yes. But laugh? No. He never does it around me. But I am not really a person to crack jokes either.
Lara is a brilliant woman. She is beautiful, smart, well spoken. She is the CFO of our company. Just a year older than me. She is elegant in every way. Tall, taller than me, with beautiful red hair. She is also extremely nice to me. And I've never been able to find it fake. I am not jealous of her, but I do wish I had a life similar to her.
A life where I don't eat any sort of food I find to fight drowsiness that comes with my situation. I would've atleast had a better figure then. I am not even the pretty plus size person. I am just a midsized woman with brown skin, brown eyes and black hair. Nothing extraordinary about me. I am not even curvy, maybe a little bit but not much. Just a regular woman with belly fat. All that beauty I was once praised for? All gone. Vanished.
And when I didn't have anything good going on in my life, someone above thought, why not make her life even more miserable.
The glass in my hand shakes. Another issue. I try to steady my hold, trying to place the glass back on the bar but the violent tremors of my hand makes it slip past my hold, fall to the ground and shatter. The drink, which I still can't recall the name of, splatters on the floor with some of it falling on my white heels.
I step away from the scene, almost losing my balance and falling back on my butt, when two arms wrap around me. My eyes fall shut. He left his conversation in the middle to look after me. Why the hell can I not do a single thing right?
"Are you alright, sweetheart? Are you hurt?" I shake my head, apologizing to the waitress who came forward to clean the mess. The mess that I made. I am always the one who makes the mess, with other people cleaning them after me. It's honestly humiliating.
Reyansh holds me close as he apologizes as well along with tipping the waitress a few pounds. She seems happy with that and walks off after collecting the trash. Everyone just stares at me and that makes me loathe myself more than I already do. "I think we should take our leave. What do you say Seher? Do you wanna stay some more?" I shake my head again.
We walk outside where his bodyguard or should I say my bodyguard, as he assigned him to me, gives us our coats. Reyansh helps me with mine only then pulling his own on. The car waits at the gate. The beautiful Ashton Martin, but for once I like the chill more. I stare at the car blankly, while Reyansh and Rahul, my bodyguard, both wait patiently for me to sit down.
I don't. I turn and start to walk along the road. Both the men following my lead without a word. Reyansh walks next to me with Rahul a few steps behind.
We walk. For a very long time with no words shared. I cross the road to stand on the edge of the bridge overlooking the river Thames. The water is calm. Quiet. But it's silence doesn't weigh as heavy as the one between the man behind me and I feels. I pull my hands behind my back. My nails, pressing into the flesh of my other hand, marking my skin with little crescents.
It grounds me. Calms me down, until two hands take that away from me. He rubs his thumb over the crescent marks, soothing it like ice on burns. But what does he know? My mind burns my soul alot more than my actions do. And my words would burn his.
