She did not know how long she laid there but she did not want to move. Especially now that the sun was low in the horizon and the sky was a delicious tinge of marmalade. Probably she could just lay there forever. Would anyone notice that she wasn’t around anymore? It had been months since her last conversation with her mother or with anyone that was not related to work. It had been months since she was more than just a ghost of person.
She wasn’t always like this; so anonymous, so invisible and so dead on the inside. Her life wasn’t always crammed into monotonous tiny cubicles. This was life after the breakup. She knew it was coming when drunken evenings resulted in lots of shouting and not inebriated silly giggles. She knew it was coming when more often than not conversations resulted in either one hanging up on the other’s face and then spent nights starring at the ceiling waiting for the phone to ring. She knew it was coming when there were no more dances. She knew it was coming when she realized that there was nothing left to fight for or against. But that did not mean that he did not take a chunk of her heart when he left.
For a while, after he left, she had filled her life with silence broken only by the humdrum of everyday life and sounds of her silent sobs that echoed night after night. And then came the melancholy of drinking away your sadness till the body is numb of pain and the heart can no longer feel.
Then one day she found herself tripping and falling over her unsteady feet leading her up to the roof. So here she was laying on dusty shingle surrounded by empty beer cans watching the sun set far away in horizon, contemplating the end of her life, when it started to rain. The near invisible drizzle had given way to gentle pitter patter of an early November shower but she did not notice. Her attention was focused on the children’s laughter floating up as they danced in the rain. Pure unadulterated laughter like the ones in her past. She watched intently, as a little girl joined in the dance, awkwardly at first with unsure steps. But soon she lost herself in the dance till she slipped and fell in the mud. For a second everyone stood still as the little girl got up on her feet, looked at her pretty blue dress covered in mud, shrugged and started dancing again.
And just like that there was a spark of life in her again. Perhaps it was the rain that washed away her pain or it was the untouched sound of the children’s laughter or perhaps it was the little girl who did not let a little mud come in the way of her dancing. I don’t know. But her life felt right again, as right as rain.
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This post is my entry for a campaign by Housing.
UPDATE: This entry was awarded a Flipkart voucher worth 2000 INR