Once Upon a Time in London

Chapter 50

I smell like lilies.

So insufferably like lilies that I can hardly breathe.

It almost seems like one of life's biggest cruelties, how the knowledge of something makes you so much more aware of it.

Almost like breathing, a cycle that continues every minute, every second of the day but goes by unnoticed until we are reminded of it somehow and then the breaths that follow are ragged and strained until the act is once again forgotten about.

That is how I feel right now.

As I run down the streets that have once again gotten so familiar to me, almost as if I'd never left in the first place, as if the years I had spent in London were nothing but a dream, a story I'd spun to myself in the idle moments of uncertainty and haziness right before falling asleep, a fairytale to pray for good dreams. That is what I hope this is, what it should be because my heart is burning in my chest, or maybe it is my lungs from the lack of sufficient air making its way into my body, I'm winded and tired. Running was never something for me to brag about, but for once I really did wish that I would make it. That the curses I'd huffed while running laps in P.E. class paid off and I can make it in time. There would be enough time to catch my breath after. Because for the first time in my life I was afraid, am afraid of what will come after if I can't. If there even was an after I wanted if I don't make it. 

The night after that day had been the longest, as if it would never end.

After Zain had left and the house was empty there was nothing left but the hum of Zeenat's crying and Zain's heartache chasing me like a shadow, I couldn't sleep, even if I had wanted to. And god how much I didn't want to sleep that night, afraid of the wailing that would follow me into my dreams. So there I sat, on the rug next to my bed, cross legged with Rahul's diary in my lap. I bit my lip, drumming my fingers on the hard cover, I took in a deep breath as I looked around, at the moonlight streaming in from the window in front of me, at the gold letters it lit up on the book's cover, diary it said. Rahul was smart, so sickeningly smart that he was irritating. And weirdly compulsive, the type to label powdered sugar as salt just to mess with you. And for someone like him to write into something so obviously labelled made me chuckle. And for a second it lightened my heart and the guilt I felt from wanting to read something so personal. I flicked open the front cover, turned the blank page until his handwriting came into view, at the words that were scrawled on it, almost as if they had been written in a hurry. Only they hadn't been, I knew this. Rahul did not have bad handwriting yet he wrote like he was always in a hurry, the words printed into immortality in a rushed style. He had joked about it once but I had trouble recalling his exact words as my heart beat fast in anticipation. I couldn't quite focus on his words, this was okay right? Zeenat had given this to me, albeit with tears in her eyes, I wince at the memory but she had insisted, with a note of urgency, that I read it. This was the point of no return, I knew this, my hands were shaking, I slapped my right hand with my left, as if that would stop the quivering but really it was a distraction before I finally started reading the notebook in my lap.

Rahul hated computers with a passion, if he wasn't required to do his assignments online he would be working on everything the traditional way, this was one of the earliest things we had found in common. I didn't necessarily despise technology but found it much quicker to write on paper than to type on a computer. And although I had forgotten about this detail over the years, I wasn't surprised to find that he kept a physical diary rather than some document on his computer that he vented to. I always knew this way of writing would be his downfall.

The first few pages are things from school, snippets of what happened throughout the day, and in some way I could imagine him reading this to his grandchildren, picking and choosing which anecdotes he wanted to share with them for their bedtime story, I smile at the thought. I skim through the first few entries and stop as a familiar name declares itself on his page, my name. My heart beats faster in my chest and I place a hand over it. And then I run my fingers over my name, something about this, to have my name be in his diary, something he had written, Anjali, something about it makes me come undone, I am putty in his hands, if he were here now, I am afraid of what I would say to him. We had years between us that I had to make up for.