MONA-LISA

PART FOUR

    I awoke from my slumber feeling numb. The skin of my arm was breaking. I rubbed my calloused palms against them, at once feeling the crispness that made me shudder. I can't remember the last time I felt like myself or felt comfortable living in my own skin. The maligning thuds in my head left me in greater confusion. I was familiar with migraine but the headache that caused my thoughts to collide into one another was a familiar stranger. I knew it and yet each time it came, I got perplexed like it came in different apparels.
    Each slumber left me groggy and sometimes dizzy after a bout of mournful mares but this sleep was slightly different. I dreamt of nothing and yet the emptiness seemed to be drowning with intent. I suddenly felt the urge to speak to someone. It's been so long since I saw my husband. He never came to see me and Nadim always made excuses for him. I knew he was not too busy to see me. It was love that kept him away. He could not stand to see me like this, weighed down by this bitterness I cant not shrug aside.
    I remember when he first changed after the birth of our daughter. He was no longer the lanky youth I married but had become a fat slob with esteem issues that often led to bouts of temper and hours of sulking over beer and cigarette. I had to send for my sister back home so she could look after our daughter since my husband had....had just changed.
    My next thought made me smile, a weak smile not capable of shrouding the doleful longing in my heart.
    Nadim was the perfect person. She took care of my Monalisa like she was hers even when I travelled with my boss. Then I started noticing changes. My husband no longer drank to stupor and soon he quit smoking. He became so sweet to me and I knew that Nadim was the miracle. Her ways were so subtle and graceful. Although our parents never saw much good in her but I saw it all because we were close. She was lissom, Petite and always sweet. She was the type of person who had very little demands from life. She didn't desire anything and her contentedness even with nothing sometimes made me envious of her.
    The rancor of some birds chirping outside my window jostled me back from my reverie. At a certain stage, memories are the best we get from life. The succour and warmth in the fastidious candour that we lived those times is what we need to maintain our tranquility.
    I hobbled out of my bed. The tweeting of those birds welled inside me a sudden desire to go outside, out of my room.
    The living room looked surprisingly new. In fact I stumbled and lulled to the sofa. I wasn't accustomed to the things I saw. My room was my prison and I had become so used to staying in it that I did not know what it was like being else where. I shut my eyes to gather composure as I do in my dreams but even that sobriety evaded me. I was too aware of the presence of furniture and bright light pouring into the room from too many open windows and through the silk curtains. A deathly cold palm seized my wrist, small like the palm of a child. I gasped out of my sublime state, the intensity of the gasp making me jump but what I saw dropped my jaw below focus level....