A Life Of Lies | ✔

Hansika • 7

Present: April 15, 2018

"Rajma chawal ready, madam," the maid Kavita announces as she places the lunch on the table. She glances at me, trying to judge my mood. I groan internally. Everyone is walking on eggshells around me ever since he left. It just makes me want to scream into the air, scream at the world, scream the irritation around me. Everything adds up to the wrecked mess of a being I am.

I close my eyes, still feeling the angry cries I let out the night before in the bathroom ringing in my ears. The image of my naked body in the full - sized mirror still runs fresh in my mind's projector. My reflection: her eyes were a vial of blood, the bags underneath tired and heavy, her mouth was a tight knot - neither up nor down - and the lips were blue, there were marks running from her shoulders to her now slightly heavier breasts, veins slowly appearing from fatigue, the bottom of her stomach barely bulging - but bulging with life nonetheless - and her legs barely holding up. The metal of the towel railing she was holding onto was nippy as she tightened her white fingers around them and screamed at her reality. Her loud shrills pierced through the crisp air and entered my ears, raising goosebumps on my body. Her body was shaking like a house built on cards, ready to break down into a pile of nothing any waking moment.

I wouldn't want to be her. A small smile almost forms on my lips at the grounding irony.

"Madam, please eat. You look so tired," Kavita insists. I nod for the sake of acknowledgment. She wordlessly returns to the kitchen, leaving me alone at the dining table.

Loneliness. That's a completely new feeling for me. Whether the ones who surround me are here for the better or for the worse, I always did have people surrounding me. Ayansh has been here every single day since the accident. Just like he promised me.

The memory of that particular event is supposed to be faded. It is supposed to be a blur, for I was connected to machines that beeped relentlessly to keep me away from death. I had very little sense of consciousness. But still, that memory in the Intensive Care Ward of Mary's Memorial Hospital.

Flashback - August 4th, 2017

It was my third time coming back. My mind kept dragging me back and forth between reality and blurred visions of the past. I didn't know how true the 'reality' was behind my fuzzy vision and dimming senses, but somehow I did know that I was not dreaming. Because in all my dreams, I saw my mother. I was lying my head down on her thighs once, resting on her shoulders in the other, sit in front of her as she massaged my head softly the other time. She was there in all the visions. My dead mother gave me the warmth that I needed all my life in my dreams when my consciousness played with reality and imagination.

My mother died when I was seven. She was a hardworking, beautiful, kind woman who took so many blows from life and never once retaliated. Her retaliation was not doing anything to stop the thrashing life gave her. But at the end, she was dragged away by the hands of a monster called uterus cancer.