One of the other gloomiest nights wears on to a morning. She rolls her fingers over her already half-opened eyes and pulls her husband’s arm softly aside to get out of the bed. After a while, she was fastening the laces of her pink Nike trainers and ready to jog ! She knew, she’d run so hard today that her feet would feel wounded and her legs would hurt like hell. Her breath would feel irregular for hours and her heart would beat in her ears for long. And after all that, she won’t still stop. She’d jog until all the energy inside her body would be drained out. And today wasn’t different from the other days that had been creeping slowly.
Why such torture on her own self ? She had no concrete answer.
With his head filled with confusions, he turned the page. He had started reading this fiction written on a beautiful white leather covered diary but after reading only the first page, he felt some things strangely familiar. As if, he actually knows the heroine of this story…. As if….
May be, to trick her mind into thinking about her tired body rather than her ruptured heart full of fears of the future and guilt of the past. May be, to get rid of those painful anxiety attacks and depression disorders. Or maybe, just to distract herself from her own self. Sometimes, the un-satisfying reasons you give yourself are not important enough.
“I can’t have a child. I am not able enough to bring a new life into this world. For all my life I have done nothing but to hurt my loved ones. I can’t be a parent I am a total mess”
For years, these small sentences were often followed by painful cries while she’d go to sleep at nights, with needles tingling all over her body and rapid breaths getting out of control. Her husband would sit aside holding her hands and pushing her head against his chest. Sometimes, silent presence of a loved one is better that a thousand empty words. He was her doctor, her friend and her faith.
The day when their baby was born, her eyes smiled while staring at his eyes with pride. The pride of winning the battle against anxiety and depression while fighting together, the pride of loving and being loved innocently and purely — and most importantly, the pride of being a Mother !
He couldn’t find himself strong enough to read another hundred or more pages. This fiction was not a fiction, as this diary was not just a diary.
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I am sitting in my bed today watching Mother’s day programs on Tv. He comes rushing towards me and hides himself in my embrace, as he used to do when he was a kid.
“I love you, Mama ! I won’t be able to thank you for the priceless love you have given me in all these years, and I want to tell you that you are important to me more than anyone in the whole world. Everyone loved you mama, they just didn’t express their love the way you needed. I don’t want to be like them“
Saying these words, he hands me over a copy of this famous magazine. I open that half folded page in curiosity and there I see, my 25 year old story published in a neater version with my name.
I recalled, I was scared of writing diaries because the thought of getting exposed and judged frightened me. That’s why I started giving my daily anecdotes a color of fiction.
He understood my ‘fiction’ when nobody could. I wonder, how many more strange habits had he taken from his father ?
Inspired by The Daily Post.
White Shadows 