A journey through love, loss, and the inevitable unravelling

By Ishana Sharma

He experienced a sudden piercing ache in his heart, as if someone had clenched it tightly. Time came to a standstill as his lungs seemed to unravel, and flowers bloomed within his chest, constricting him.

Spring, with its exquisite beauty.

In the throes of a galloping heartbeat and a mind in delirium, he witnessed the crimson Gulmohars gracefully descending into tranquility. The sense of belonging to the world disintegrated, akin to flowers shedding to yield fruit. His rosy fingers clenched onto the white sheet, bathed in sunlight; oblivion had arrived.

His body was unraveling, a beautiful dissolution, much like winter snow yielding to the arrival of spring. Like snowflakes joyfully dancing with the breeze, so jubilant, so splendid, yet fleetingly brief.

“It’s a cardiac arrest!”

Everything in life entails inherent sacrifice. What brings us joy inevitably brings sorrow. Like flowers that herald life and poetry but ultimately transform into empty vessels of sorrow on tombstones.

The struggle gradually subsided, but he didn’t wish for it to. Defibrillation, coupled with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, yet…

Can you prevent a leaf from changing colours? We don’t even attempt it. Because that’s the essence of change—a cycle, secure in the understanding that serenity lies in letting go.

“Whatever remains after you’ve departed, I dare not contemplate.” I gazed at him one final time. “Instead, dance with me in this splendid moment of morbid extinction, for with you, I am my most beautiful self.”

I looked at him, nestled among those exquisite blue flowers, in that tranquil casket. Perhaps it was a dream, because… he appeared too beautiful to be real, so ethereal, adorned in white, resembling an angel.

I had never scrutinised him closely; his eyelashes were short, light eyebrows, a slight pit mark on the right cheek, blemishes on his forehead, and his ginger hair was long but unrefined.

He wasn’t perfect at all. Yet, as a whole, he was so beautiful.

But in the end, we all metamorphose into stories.

Not all stories have another chapter.