SHE
Proactive, yes that’s how you would describe her. She would never sit down for a moment. She would go on, and on relentlessly. Those who saw her every day -- hair in a mess, sporting clothes that hung loosely from her ever pale body, eyes swollen and red-- would tell you that she was running on without a goal, without any destination.
But for her, the goal was set and the destination, a matter of time and sweat.
She refused to let in anyone, anyone into her dreams. Her dreams were sacred, too precious to be shared. She wouldn’t admit that it was her fear of being let down that shut people out. Hers was a valid reason -- dreams can’t be explained, they could only be lived. And wasn’t she living it?
Yes she was because the journey to her dream was as sacred to her as the dream itself. And so days turned to months, months to years, but she couldn’t admit that she was nowhere near attaining her dream. She had lost a great deal of time, but as long as the air filled her lungs, her dreams were for real. She held on, without murmur.
Her lustrous raven black hair had since long turned to a glimmering white shade, her peers got married, got their children married. Wedding invites of both father and son, lay strewn all over the desk, sealed and desolate, much like the rug, of which no decipherable pattern was left, except for the few rugged strands of coir, that scraped her ankle every time she passed by.
The clock was the only thing that grabbed her attention, only because every minute brought her closer to her dream, or so she thought. She would meticulously polish its metal frame, change its cell, watch it dotingly like a parent and smile when the hands moved. Those spindly arms moved with a precision that calmed her nerves.
She had a strange habit; she kept scribbling at whatever the hands could find, and so the ineligible squiggles were plastered across the walls, etched on newspaper rolls that were never opened, on greasy porcelain bowls, cups, on dusty glass windows that framed her room, even on the spectacles, held up bit by bit by glue. And so she saw the world from between the scribbles, partially blinded.
It didn’t bother her, but then nothing ever did. Neither the fact that the light in her eyes was dimming, nor that her fingers were shaking uncontrollably.
She was alive and so was her dream.
And then one day she woke up early in the morning, walked out of the house, her back turned to the unkempt backyard.
They found notes strewn right from the porch to the riverbed. And there it ended. As they frantically looked around for a trace of her, the last note wet with dew, lifted by a gust of wind, drifted afloat on the river.
A few meters ahead, in the thickets beside the river bed, lay, the body of a man, his face slashed across with the words: ‘My Dream’.
