"Every day I look at him," I wrote in my diary, "I find him in the dark, but his eyes gleaming with hope, that tomorrow, light will surely sky in." But it didn't. It felt like it had been an era in the dark.
I had grown to comply with the darkness. It was my home. The windows of the square pixel we lived in never saw any sun, and neither could any moonlight reach us. There was a light switch just beside the study table, but the light bulb had never glowed bright in a long time, so long that I wasn't even sure if it worked. Listening to the air-silent noise of the universe of the miniature, dim and cramped room, and accompanied by my resolute solidarity with solitude, I had been living in this dark cavity decorated as a deep, defeated hued oblivion for years. And those long, long years had taught me to learn to live like this, a listless nobody, going to work I was assigned to do, eat what they made, take leaves when they allowed me to. I had accepted this slivered fate with a smile, but to his misfortune, he had not.
He had been in my life since my childhood. I saw him every day. I knew him. I knew his life had never been easy. And yet I knew he always found the courage to be hopeful. I knew there came many hits in his way but yet he went on never changing the road. I knew many had told him to be realistic and I knew him enough to know how he was never eager to agree to the truth, until it was too late, until the world forced him to bow down.
"She will come back," he never stopped mumbling when the news of his best friend passing away once reached his doors. He didn't believe it for a long time. He stopped going to school, and I kept trying to reach him, console him, but there was this thick layer between us that didn't let me through. For weeks, I shouted but he was too busy chanting "She'll come back, I know," and waiting for her to enter the room until the moon was up, and his eyes were down.
"She won't," I finally whispered.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"Because no one comes back from the dead," said I. She didn't either, and he was broken. His lips couldn't stop trembling for months. Everyone kept asking him, begging him to move on while he took notice to none. He failed his exams that year.
"I'm in a cage," he often used to talk about the micro world we inhabited. He wanted to go back to the life he had, the one that though wasn't all pleasant, but at least had a future, the one that though wasn't glamorous, but wasn't ash grey, and the one that though wasn't really fragrant, but wasn't airless either. He wanted to feel the same breeze that blew years ago, and see those same old colours again. He wanted to feel someone's touch, even though beyond a shadow of doubt he knew there was no one there. He lived in a barren, and waited for a cloud to burst, unwilling to accept that this thirst could never be quenched.
"Trying to breathe life into an unreal dream," I would tell him, "an impossible vision is futile, and consenting to the truth is always important, isn't it?"
"I don't want to let this be my truth," he would always reply.
It had been around a year after school, when it happened. The day never stopped remember being crystal clear in my mind. It was a fiery evening when he looked at me, eyes filled with tears, cheeks red, clothes torn at places, and fingers a little burnt; his father had torn the novel he had written and set the pieces on fire. Even after years, when I looked at his eyes, I sometimes saw the same flame burning his soul. As our eyes met that bedevilled twilight, I somehow felt his pain, and as I kept looking, my heart ached like it was being squished. It was like I could feel those torn clothes on my body, and like it were my fingers that were afire.
"What would you do now?" I asked him, and I saw him fight hard to gather up the courage to form words, but his lips didn't move, not even a little. A few weeks later, he started going to the medical college his father wanted him to go to, and just when one would have begun to assume he finally bowed down, just a few months later he found the audacity to start writing another novel.
