Stories we will never tell - Hopscotch

She stepped up to the closet and opened it. It had been eight years since she last opened it. Her parents always pestered her to get rid of all the stuff and she too had always thought of going through it to discard the unwanted things, yet she barely had time whenever she came home for the one week during the holidays. But this time she made time for herself and she really wanted to get this over with.

When she opened the closet she saw the compartmentalisation of her childhood into piles of comic books, bags filled with pairs of old shoes and clothes, boxes filled with things that once meant the world to her and photo albums of her posing with strangers whom she once called friends.

She picked up a box - the one that was the easiest to grab from the haphazardly arranged closet. She opened it to find a cap - a plain white baseball cap with a red swoosh on the front. It belonged to one of her exes who had left it behind. No… she recalled keeping it for herself as a memory of him.

She put the cap away and then looked at a few of her old assignments from high school - economics, she hated it so much and her dad had helped her out. And then there were a few paintings that her brother had painted for her, back when he was still innocent and she couldn’t care less about because she had problems of her own. A soft ball came next, and then a few collectibles… things she did not even care to pick up.

She placed the box back in the closet and closed it. And she slowly sat back on her bed, looking out of the window that faced the road that she grew up on - the old ash tree that had been there from long before she was born, the broken mailbox that her mom always wanted to fix but never did and the marks on the pavement from when they played hopscotch as kids.

Eight years she thought, reminding herself the last time that any of these things meant anything to her. And the closet, the room and the house spanned seventeen years, all her childhood was in there. Seventeen years of her life. Almost every day of all those years had passed by uneventfully - no major difference between one day and the next, no real significance of time on her daily activities - yet here she was looking back at seventeen years of a life - ‘of her life’ - and all she saw was a closet full of discarded memories.

Stories we will never tell - Wasted!

“It was a lazy summer sunset. The stars that shone brightly and beautifully in her chestnut eyes were somehow left unseen by the sea of people that swept past her. She was on her daily ritualistic long walk back to her apartment. Nothing unusual, nothing strange. She had done this hundreds of times - traversed the same stretch of sidewalk for the past few months. In fact she was so used to the neighbourhood that she knew the shapes that were made by the off-white paint that had peeled away from the walls of the house in which the old lady lived with her 3 cats.“

‘No, this doesn’t seem right. This definitely isn’t something worth writing!’ - he thought absent-mindedly while spinning the pen in between his middle and index fingers of his right hand. Here he was, sitting in the middle of the night, not knowing what to do with any of this; and not knowing where his life was headed. With only the chirping of crickets and the creaking of the rusted gate for company, he did what he always did - he hoped she would respond. He hoped she would reciprocate. But that’s what Einstein had called insanity - repeating the same thing again and again, while expecting different results. 

He thought he was going insane. Or was his inebriated mind playing tricks with him? These  and a million other thoughts filled his head as he read the last line he had written - “In fact she was so used to the neighbourhood that she knew the shapes that were made by the off-white paint that had peeled away from the walls of  the house in which the old lady lived with her 3 cats.“ Should he even be typing this? He knew she wasn’t a cat person! She loved dogs, not cats! She has a dog! Why did he even type ‘cats’?

And just as his intoxicated self cursed at his cowardice and at himself, just as his body slowly collapsed on to the bed whose sheets were filled with blue orchids and yellow chrysanthemums, just as he was curling up into the blanket, the last thoughts that filled his brain were of her - that even though she would not respond, he could still be content with the knowledge that she was safe and happy. Not forever, not all the time, but hoping that the feeling would last for a while. Or at least until he gets to drink again, he finally thought before slipping into unconsciousness!

Remorse

It was almost noon and the sun shined through the curtains, casting shadows on the kitchen floor. She slowly walked in and saw all the mess from the night before - broken dishes, disheveled cutlery and stains of alcohol on the curtains and the door. Her hair was just as unkempt as the kitchen and from the emotionless eyes of her stoic face you could tell that she had been crying. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat near the dining table and stared right through the window. And a slight hint of pain showed up on her sunlit face. Maybe it was not pain but suffering, you couldn’t really tell. And she thought of all the memories - memories of love, of happiness, of a joy that can only be felt and never expressed, a pleasure that soared from the depths of her heart. And all of these joys and delights were shattered just like the crockery which lay on the floor.

“Would you ever choose a short-lived happiness which you know would end in sadness and despair?“ He had asked her once. She hadn’t replied – she couldn’t reply. She had been lost in her thoughts and her own hubris.

Now that she knew the answer, it wasn’t relevant anymore. Life keeps throwing stuff at random and it is most often only in retrospect that you realize that what you didn’t hold on to was a crucial part which could have resolved a lot of issues. She should have answered it, she thought now, or at least put more thought into what was being asked.

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The window wasn't out of the ordinary and the home too wasn't noteworthy. It was a rather long room and the sliding window had diamond shaped grills. A pale curtain blew slowly in the moist breeze, acting as a veil which let him gaze outside without being seen.

He was sitting in a small corner of a room with a note pad into which he was scribbling something, and his presence was almost nonexistent in the minimalist room consisting of nothing more than a table and a chair. As he silently thought of her, he realized that he didn't like the grills on the windows and resented the curtain. They obstructed the view and the ruffling curtain was distracting him.

“Would you ever choose a short-lived happiness which you know would end in sadness and despair?“ He had asked her once. She hadn’t replied – he wept. And he now resented that he had asked that question. He rued the fact that he expected too much from people.

Now that he knew it was not the right question to ask, it was important to make sure he never asked such questions again. But he couldn’t help expecting someone to just listen to what he was saying, and he wished that someone would be willing to meet him halfway through.