The Color of Her Veil

Standing in the window of her room, she was staring into the sky with hurried, searching stares as though her life was scattered out there in bits and pieces. She was flicking through them randomly; piece by piece she was trying to connect the dots of herself.

Today when she woke up in the morning, her PDA was on her chest, she had fallen asleep while reading through her emails. She would do that every night; she would exhaust herself to the point that she would lose control. Her brain would plead with her to pay attention to what it was contemplating. She let the blinking light on her PDA distract her without much effort, one of her friends had left her an IM “you have become so cold, I can barely recognize you.” She looked at the message with apathy, and then got out of the bed. She had a packed schedule.

She sipped her hot coffee, and remembered when she was a little girl, when she lost her mother and how her father had conveniently shifted the burden of her upbringing to her little shoulders. “You are a very brave girl, I know.” he said. And she locked the little girl somewhere inside. She was no longer daddy’s little girl.

And last night on the dining table when her brother was ranting about her “need” to get married he shouted from across the table “Why have you become so difficult to talk to? When did you become so cynical?” He was so mad at her. She looked at her father with a glimmer of hope and saw nothing but indifference on his face. These were the men she grew up with; she had become a perfect stranger for them. “Beta, why are you so distant? When did you change so much?”

“When you were busy presuming something else of me dad, when you were not looking.” She murmured under her lips, but didn’t say anything out loud.

Her coffee was still warm like all her thoughts, she flicked.

There was a time when she suffered silently inside with existential angst; her losses had lead her to believe that there has to be a higher compensation than her material achievements. She tripped on the path of finding a balance between within and outside.

Her PDA was ringing, it was a business call, she muted the call and put it on silent. A gust of wind blew into her face and played with her hair, breathing in the freshness she remembered when she fell in love. It was euphoria, she was happy; he was all what she had wanted in a man, may be in life. But that was the time when she became completely oblivious of herself. It ended faster than it started leaving her in tiny irreparable pieces. All the hard work of her life was in shambles. It took the life out of her to get herself in one piece again. To make herself worthy of her own respect again.

The process of finding the beginning and the end was becoming tedious for her, she was smiling at her own life, she knew that she had come a long way from herself… and going back was no more an option. It was too late. She was responsible for her own death and revival was not possible.

Life was now just a veil over the death of herself.

She switched on her CD player to Lionel Richie’s song “Three times a lady” and stared into the hollow of her future.