The Short-Term

The sparkling strand of white hair that reflected on the half-broken lift mirror didn’t seem to settle her loitering thoughts. The staggering old lift and the noisy fan just added on to the uncertainty. “I don’t think I should bear this struggle. If not for him, I could have been in a better place on my own”, she scanned through her neatly pressed formals and the Gucci bag. As the lift stopped at the 6th floor, she stepped out into the eerie veranda and headed towards her flat. The sound of the high heels echoed in the narrow abandoned walkway.

She opened the door with the extra key as she didn’t want to wake him up or have an awkward conversation again. The key just slipped and fell with a cling and without a surprise it just gave her another Deja Vu. Time machine seems to love playing with her and gave her the gear to playback the times from some 3 years ago.

It was after a party night, she remembers…How B and herself managed to get back home and how she fumbled for the keys in his pocket and yes, just like how it slipped it fell that day too. That one BHK was a heaven. A small space confined with all that she wanted in life, including him. The sleepovers in the weekends doing nothing but cuddling, surprising him with a morning tea at times to act like a matured-girlfriend, cooking together the best and the worst dishes, managing late night calls from home with all the drama and more. It was a home, which didn’t have them together for long.

She opened the door and entered the flat to see Hoogie awake. He sniffed around and licked her hands as she brushed him with love just like how he used to do, years ago. She realizes the part of HIM inside her, in every single mannerism of hers, which wasn’t a surprise for having been together for 5 years. But she is happy, if not for this feeling of having his traits living inside her, what else would have kept her going with this short-tempered man!

She was ready to crash after the long day but wanted to grab something before bed. Kitchen was a mess! Piled up dishes, burnt chappathi and vegetables peels all over the place! She didn’t expect anything less from the short-tempered man whom she hated for her own reasons as he never knew how to handle anything…ANYTHING in life! As she grabbed the apple from the fridge, she recalled how B used to keep the house clean and how sometimes his OCD used to drive her crazy, dealing with every dust that appeared in the house. “But it was fun…”, she murmured.

She entered the room to see the him asleep on the bed. He had issues with every Tom, Dick and Harry… he hates everything that I loved, he was just the opposite of me. He hated it when I could take plates from the top shelf while he couldn’t, he gets annoyed when I beg to move to a better house as for him, every single penny counts.

She remembers how he smirked saying, “Why you need a new bottle? As long as you can hold water in the old crumbled one, its shape doesn’t matter!” She remembers how she gave him that stare and gave her card to pay the whole bill at the counter just because she had a bottle that he didn’t have in the list to buy. He was ruthless. “I wonder if he ever has a piece of emotion in him!”

“He had seen me starve…he had seen me lock myself inside a room for days…he had heard me scream inside the bathroom…he had watched the tears rolling down my cheeks amidst sleep…But he never said a word. Never reacted. Never asked.”

Ending a day so long, was never easy for her. Every day the struggle of meeting people and completing the day’s chores, strangles her. As she moved his hand to the side, she could feel that there was no life in it but she wasn’t shocked. She placed his hands on his chest and slid into the same blanket to welcome her nightmares that waited for her.

As she takes her sleeping pill, she sets her 6 am alarm to 9 am and keeps her phone aside, waiting for the next day to throw the procession of Deja Vus at her!