Thousand Miles

It was a rather fitful sleep to the tune of which he drifted in and out of consciousness that night. His head rested uneasily upon the pillow of his childhood bed, in his childhood bedroom but his mind was far from rest. For trying to make sense of the confusing content of his hellish nightmares was  an exhausting affair. It was however not exhausting enough to allow him the comfort of deep slumber. 

Early morning the following day, he had a flight to catch. A week’s worth of piled up work awaited him, work that had been neglected since he had to call in sick and had reluctantly decided to fly back to his parents’ house for recovery.

Just as the nightly chasm of unconsciousness was finally descending upon him, he was cruelly pulled away and awakened with a start. 

With warm beads of perspiration running down his neck, he was caught unaware and unprepared. His chest felt heavy, the weight of countless mistakes and unrelenting fears pinned him down until his limbs began shaking. He attempted to shout, to make a sound, but he quickly realised there was no way in hell he was going to give breath to anything remotely audible. He shut his eyes again, in an effort to regain his composure, to even out his broken breath. The sensation of panic gradually subsided, quite on its own and without any external help. The quivering stopped and the heavy panting ceased. His mind felt light, and he was able to achieve an empty state of relaxation. 

 He took yet another minute to steady himself, and then he groped in the dark for that bottle of water which he always kept at his bedside. Without bothering to prop himself in an upright position, having found the bottle, he worked his fingers to unscrew the plastic lid, half lying and half sitting, awkwardly, and then he drank the luke warm liquid in large, hurried gulps.

She always used to chide him over his manner of drinking water. It was a cause of great annoyance to her that he wouldn’t alter his position into something more suitable for the activity.
‘You know If you really want to kill yourself, I won’t refuse a sincere request of choking you to death’; she’d say to him in her mock sincerity, making him laugh, so hard that he’d sputter all the water over her.

He carefully placed the bottle back at its place and then her memories came gushing in and invaded the last trickle of his consciousness. Trying to sleep now was a battle he had already lost and decisively so.
How would his mind settle for the boring routine of rest when it could devote that time to figuring out the intrigue about her?

She was after all his favourite muse, comforting yet challenging.

He glanced at his watch. 11:00 PM.

She’d most likely still be at work. Her division had been swamped with the deadline of the project fast approaching.

They hadn’t been on the best of terms since their tiff a couple of weeks earlier. She had initiated contact when he had fallen ill and had missed work for two days in a row, but his condition had not allowed him the luxury of long conversation, he had to limit his answers to her caring inquires to singular words. 

He wasn’t an unreasonable man however, and so he knew she deserved a better explanation for all the effort she was putting in. So three days after he had come home, he promised to meet her and explain himself as soon as his health would allow him.
 He was confident that she would understand. She always did.

His thoughts were interrupted by Shaggy -the youngest member of his family, barking loudly in the living room which was adjacent to his. It was a tad unsettling to hear Shaggy make a sound in the dead of the night, for it was quite unlike his lazy dog to concern himself with acts of vigilance and warning.

Despite the unusual disturbance, sleep overpowered Shaggy’s human companion soon, his thoughts having exhausted him through the right trail now. Then came the blissful sleep, and washed over him with the strength of morphine and he tumbled into its arms, hoping that this time he’d be treated to dreams with better conclusions.

Yet he was awakened again, not by a nightmare, but by something more compelling. What somehow felt more real than reality itself. A force that tugged at him assiduously till the time he relented and opened his eyes.

It was her.

She sat on the other side of his bed with her back towards him and her legs crossed. She was humming a tune into the moonlight, gazing outside the window. Her hair was dancing in the light breeze. Suddenly, she stopped humming and turned around to find him awake, smiled, and tilted her head sideways.

His pupils became larger, a desperate attempt to accommodate both the low light and the surprise that the situation presented.

“Oh! Did I wake you up? I was planning on not doing so for about another hour . You look so peaceful when you sleep. Anyway….. How are you doing?"

Heck, that sounded exactly like her.

If someone had asked him his name in that moment, he would have been quite embarrassed at his inability to answer.
He was gaping at her, completely dumbfounded at the bizarreness and the sheer impossibility of the occurrence.

"Troubled sleep?", she tried again. Her entire being imploring him to respond. 

He looked in the direction of the origin of that familiar voice. He could trace her outline in the faint light streaming through the curtains. Her long tresses curving off her shoulder, her protruding lips beneath the perfectly shaped nose, the curve of her slender neck slightly turned in his direction.

He fumbled for the switch beside the bedside lamp and accidently knocked down his spectacles in the process.

The bulb lit up after a slight hesitation, the yellow of which didn’t seem to bounce off her completely. There was now a translucent quality to her already pale skin. She gave him another smile, reserved and unsure, sad even. She moved closer to where he was, half lying, half sitting.

"Well how are we doing? "

He stared at her, willing his tongue to form words, his mouth to open, his lips to move. Propping out his elbow, he sat upright, looked around him, blinked a couple of times and then faced her again.

She seemed upset, one could say a little hurt at the absence of a reply. He realised this. He didn’t want any of his actions to ever be the cause of her hurt. And so, courageously, he moved his hand forward to touch her. His hand grazed the side of her right cheek, instantly lighting up her bright smile.

She was really there then, sitting beside him on his bed. More than a thousand miles away from where she ought to be, from where she definitely was at that moment. And yet, here she was, in flesh and blood, beside him on his bedside.  

He smiled at her, it was not something he had to will himself to do anymore. She looked stunning in the black shimmery blouse he had gifted her and a pair of her favourite faded blue jeans. She was still wearing her white shoes with the laces undone. Her makeup was smudged, her eyes looked runny.

He registered all the details, carefully assessing her appearance as multiple scenarios clouded his head. His horror must have been betrayed by his visage. He was never known for his ability to hide emotions. 

She tried to cut short his scrutiny. It was cruel what he was doing to her. She didn’t want judgement, or pity. That’s not why she was there. She was there to say goodbye. 

“Hey, Shaggy has grown so big. I barely recognised him. He didn’t recognise me either, good to see he is finally able to bark and scare people. God he frightened the shit out of me!

So how old …..”

He called her by her name, an earnest call which made her stop mid-sentence. He inched towards her, and then as if recalling something, leaned back, picked up his spectacles and put them on.
 It didn’t make the difference he was hoping for. Everything still looked blurred, which he frustratedly attributed to his jittered senses.
Tentatively he reached out for her hands, and took them into his. They felt light, almost weightless. His face contorted itself in an expression of pain. Their eyes met, but couldn’t stay that way for long, as he shifted his gaze downward, and sighed. A tear drop trickled down, a slight tremor of his hands reverberated its way to hers.

“I know”,  he said, almost whispered, choking on his voice.

“I know something terrible must have happened for you to be here now, in this manner, at this time. Nothing else explains your presence. You cannot possibly be sitting by my side right now.”

He was hoping for her to disprove his awful assumption. To give him an easy explanation for her presence, an anecdote he would recount at parties, when he’d talk about the one time she travelled a thousand miles to show herself into his childhood bedroom, completely unannounced, with the stealth of an experienced burglar. She would stand beside him then, laughing and feeling mighty proud of her skills.

She was looking straight at him now, as her hand touched his face. He looked up at her. She was ethereal in her beauty, still smiling. She brought his hand to her lips now and placed there a gentle kiss.

He was about to start speaking again, scrambling for something appropriate, well meaning. There were so many questions, but he was afraid he already knew the answers and hearing them from her would only confirm his worst suspicions.

After a moment of hesitation, he spoke up again, still unable to meet her in the eye.

“Did it.. Does it hurt?”

“Starts slow, you either go into vehement denial or absolute numbness. Then as the reality of it all catches up with you, it starts hurting more and more. “

“I am so sorry, I really am… I can’t even… How will I ever..”

His voice was being punctuated by sobs, cracked by landslide emotions.

“Is there, Is there anything I can do? Anything at all to prevent this? To help you?”

“I am afraid not, it's too late”; she managed to say after a long, painful pause.

She looked at him, every fibre of his being soaked in despair and decided to turn the conversation away from the gloom.

“Hey. Let’s not discuss this anymore. I came to bid you farewell. We won’t have another chance to be with each other, god knows for how long. Shouldn't we make the most of this meeting ?”

“Tell me what happened, and how. I want to know “. His voice was trembling.

She sighed her sigh, the one she’d sigh when fate made her the harbinger of any unfortunate news. He could see his request was troubling her, but he deserved to know the truth and in this quest he was resolute. 

“You’ll come to know everything, soon. It’s going to be tough. Trust me, bask in the oblivion for now, the truth won't spare you for long anyway.”

That was that then. It seemed easier to postpone that conversation and luxuriate in her presence.

“TV?”, he asked her, the creases on his forehead easening slightly.

“Sure! Your pick”, she said and excitedly took off her shoes to go and sit at his side. He extended towards her a part of his pillow and she kissed him on the cheek as thanks.

They both sat next to each other, shoulders touching and legs outstretched. He held her hand, interlocking his fingers with hers with great care. Occasionally he would brush an out of the place lock of her hair and tuck it behind her ear. He sat there watching her, holding her and thinking of her to the hum of the television that blared out images in low volume and cast huge colourful reflections upon their faces.

They held hands tightly and beheld each other’s warm gazes for long into the night. She leaned towards him on occasion and planted a kiss on his forehead as he closed his eyes to hide the tears that kept welling up. After a while he wasn’t fully awake, he could tell that by the dreamlike quality of everything he saw and felt.

He felt warm sand touching the soles of his feet, each grain bearing his weight in conjunction with the others, as he gazed into the aquamarine ocean and the afternoon sun pinched his eyes as he tried to look at the horizon for too long; that which changed colour between hues of blue ever so slightly. He heard the sound of her laughter mingled into the gushes of the wind and he could see all of it as he closed his eyes.

In another moment he was sneaking into his house, his old house, way past midnight through the back door. Just that afternoon he had pleaded with his grandmother to leave the back door open for him, and had asked her to convince his mother of him being asleep, when she would come to wake him up for dinner. 
She had agreed, had gone out of her way to make up scenarios to explain how he wouldn't be hungry to his concerned mother. She had mischief twinkling in her eyes when she had agreed to his plan, but had managed to put up an iron face when she said; “Make it count! And don’t be any later than what we’ve decided”; after which she had scurried off to assist Grandpa with his walking stick. 

He saw the boy who used to bully him in kindergarten, and the teacher who slapped him for copying on his test. He saw the stage where he had performed his first act, he could her the audience cheering for him. His father was seated in the front row with a camcorder, beaming with pride. 

He saw the gates of his college, he could feel his panic at being away from home. He could taste the bile in his throat, his stomach seething with pain when his friends had carried him to a doctor. 

In another moment he was at another hospital, holding his grandmother’s hand during her final hours. When he, in spite of himself was on the verge of breaking down. That was when she had come, had sat next to him and gently squeezed his other hand. She had soothed his mind and had chatted with grandma about mundane topics, about vegetable prices and the unpredictability of the weather. And at the end of it all, he could never thank her enough for helping grandma pass through her pain.

In this cascade of memories, he soon lost track of reality and then dream and reality mingled into one.

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A few hours later, a thousand miles away, her phone rang ominously.

She had carefully placed it beside her pillow to avoid any delay.It was a call she had been expecting. With a trembling hand she pressed the green button. The caller ID confirmed that it was his mother on the other line.

“Hello… “; a pause betrayed the rhythm of her thumping heart.

She received silence from the other end, absolute, save for the incessant sound of hurried intake breaths. A mother in anguish was seeking support.

Finally a voice spoke up. 

“I never realised his fever was so bad. So many complications..There was nothing we could do when we found him like that. He was lying on his bed, hadn't even removed his spectacles.
My baby… “

“I am so sorry. But you have to take care of yourself and the family, okay? You have to be strong. I’ll be there soon.”

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She had had an uneasy feeling since the very advent of his supposedly benign fever . An inexplicable fear had gripped at her, a fear she couldn't shake off despite everyone attributing it to her excessively worrisome nature.
Soon the horrors of her worry had come true, one after the another as his health kept on deteriorating. 
Still nobody suspected how dire the final outcome would be. Nobody shared her pessimism. 

 And so, the previous night, realising it might possibly be her last chance to bid him farewell, she mustered up all her strength, and transversed the distance of a thousand miles to say Goodbye. 
Because that was all she had the strength to do.