A night before Valentine’s Day, I threw away his photos, cards and gifts. The only thing I kept with me were the memories.
Everybody falls in love, at least once in a lifetime. We talk to each other for prolonged hours, fight and then console each other, exchange presents, go on innumerable dates, and do all the crazy stuff together. It feels good to know that somebody else feels good about you and that you are special for that somebody. We often end up planning growing old together and breathing our last holding hands. But, not always does love stories have happy endings. Sometimes it lasts and sometimes it hurts instead.
When two people separate ways, the stories, that once upon a time, they wanted to scream to the world, becomes secret memories etched with the darkest ink deep within their hearts and the presents are merely reduced to souvenirs that mark the moment of their love. It is an emotional struggle to gather everything and stash them in a forgotten corner of the house.
I, too, had a similar box full of memories, which I re-discovered until I found them in an old and forgotten hidden space within my cupboard.
Now that the marriage bells are dangling above my head, I needed to clear out the old things which are no longer useful to me. I decided to donate the things to a charity. So, there I was, exploring my cupboards and finding the antiquated clothes, obsolete bills, some old books and other former stuff. It was then my heart skipped a beat when I laid my hands on a box which I remembered in my faint memories.
Suddenly, time flew backward. Each item in the box took me back to the moment where it all started. The memories of those days started rolling in my mind, like an endless roll on a rotating spool. There was a sunken realization that it had been a very long time. The gifts had a layer of dust, the ink on the bills (I used to keep the bills of the restaurant where we went on dates) had faded out, the papers had a yellow aged hue and the flowers had become fragile. The letters had become so brittle along the folds that they could literally break off in an instance. All of a sudden, there was a time warp and I went back to history again, this time with teary eyes. It was difficult. I opened a letter which caught my attention but could not read it as the ink was blotched with water, probably my tears, while I was reading it back then. It was the last letter sent to me. I could feel the pain of the separation, again and it was nerve-wracking. Large tears brimmed in my eyes but I had to wipe them off as fast as I could. After all, I was the bride-to-be and I was weeping over bygone memories. So, I hid my face and swallowed my sadness, to avoid the suspicious eyes of my relatives following me everywhere.
Somehow, I managed to gather myself, like I did then and once again put everything inside the box, only to discard this time. I knew I had been strong then and I needed to be strong now. Although, we decided to part ways long time back, yet the agony of the separation lingered because of the attachment we had for each other. There was no scope to meet him or call him anymore to bid him goodbye before I start a new journey of life. Thus, as I crammed all the relics of our young love in the box again, I silently remembered him in my thoughts and whispered my last farewell wishes.
