House of Ashes [Complete]

41. Mirage | سراب

Finally after 84 years!

Please, Vote and Comment, so that my petrified self knows her readers haven't left her yet, 'cause otherwise, I'm gonna cry and I cry so bad, you guys might even have to stuff your ears with cotton.

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Mirage! A false hope that we all drink at. An illusion that keeps us wading through the capricious waves of our unbridled lives. A fib we feed on, not knowing it's it that's feeding on us instead. Human craves for this incorrigible feeling because living a beautifully warped up lie is far better than coming face to face with the face of incinerated reality. Saddening yet comforting. Chaotically smooth. Nothing but a mirage. And in the end, it shatters into nothingness of everything. Everything horrific.

And just like that when Safa woke up from her sleep of dreaming about him playing cheerfully in the school playground, her mirage broke into nothingness of everything horrific. Him. Ayyan. The kid she had loved more than anyone.

"You alright?" Raina chirped from where she was occupied on a nearby sofa.

"What do you think?" Her voice was eerily calm. The kind of calm that ensues after the storm has eaten everything up in its wake. Raina looked at her dilapidated form laid on the hospital bed with immense pain lucid on her face.

"I'm so sorry for what happened."

Her eyes were fixated on the roof, her hands placed on her stomach. No movement. No drop of tear. Nothing whatsoever. She was dwelling in her misery and Raina didn't want her to drown in that chasm.

"You know, it's not the cancer that took him."

Still no words. Just silence. Raina inhaled a deep breath. This needed to be told. She needed to cry. Crying was important.

"It was a fall." She commenced, scrutinizing on her. "He fell while taking shower and hit his head right on the basin." She looked back at her still form with no sign of shock. "Cruel, isn't it? Death! Scares us all with one possibility to take someone away and just when we think we have defeated it, it, so cunningly, defeats us instead by snatching them away through an impossibility right from under our noses. What a sly!"

"Doesn't matter." This was the first time she spoke up ever since she had woken up.

"What do you mean?" Raina scrunched her eyes in confusion. This wasn't something she was expecting her to say. Not even in the slightest.

"What's gone is gone. There's no use crying over spill beans."

"That's harsh."

"So is life. You need to toughen up." Ripping the drip off, she hopped off the bed.

"Where are you going?" Raina asked, restlessly, as she chased her.

"To the washroom. You wanna come?" The sarcasm was so unSafaish that it terrified Raina to her very core.

"You need to mourn, Safa!" She called over her, making her halt in her track as she turned her head a bit.

"Safa Hayat never mourns. Hafsa Ameen did." Mumbling the last sentence, she stepped into the washroom.

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