𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐎𝐕𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐎 : 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐎𝐧 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐬

..𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄..

unwind with - Deewani Mastani by Shreya Ghoshal

{ If you had time to read, you have time to appreciate. Don’t disappear like a ghost. }

First Week

The person you are trying to connect is not answering.

That robotic voice repeated itself twice before the line went dead.
I stared at my phone screen, the hollow reflection of my own eyes glimmering back at me from the black glass.
The tiny ache that had been gnawing at my heart since he left sharpened.
In these three days since he had left, our words had been painfully scarce, only five fleeting conversations, each one hurried, clipped, leaving more questions than answers and each ending with a hollow pause that echoed louder than any silence before.
I dropped the phone into the drawer of my desk and forced myself to inhale deeply, reminding myself where I was, the bank at my desk, under the dim glow of fluorescent lights.

Numbers.
Accounts.
Ledgers.
They had always felt like a place of comfort for me, like a language that asked for nothing but precision.
Yet today, they looked blurry, distorted, as if the columns and balances were teasing me for failing to balance my own emotions.

I glanced at the little desk calendar pinned beside the computer monitor. Three days.
Only three days since he boarded that flight back to Los Angeles and it already felt like a hollow lifetime had passed.
My pen slipped from my hand.
The sound of its fall was lost in the shuffle of people's heels striking marble floors, hushed chatter, the rustling of papers. The air smelled of ink, faint perfume and the metallic tang of coins.

A sigh escaped my lips before I could stop it.
Three days.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him at the doorway of the house, his smile strained with promises neither of us could spell out.
The memory was cruel like his eyes carrying an entire ocean and yet he had walked away as if it was just a road crossing.