The Long Road

She had always meant for it to last forever. He knew this was the right way to move ahead in life. It was the logical thing to do. She stretched her arm out to him and he thought that holding it would make her feel nice and so he did. The wind blew her hair over her face as she smiled through those strands. He was happy that she felt this way. Her hands were cold as ice and he always seemed to have the warm and soft ones. He let the ice of her hands melt on him, it was a feeling similar to that in his heart. He did not feel warm inside, he just felt, nothing. As the rains of Mumbai started to fall on them, he escorted her to the nearest taxi and bid her goodbye. As he turned around to walk back home, she had been watching him the entire time as the car moved away from him. Till he was nothing but a small speck in the distance, till a drop fell on it and it trailed the length of the window out of her sight.

Now, his hands were not as soft as before. He was struggling to keep them warm. He had his only thick jacket on him to keep him from freezing as he trudged along the path up the mountain. Surrounded by the thick trees of Transylvania, he stared up at the skies which had turned grey now. It would be snowing soon. He had grown a beard since then and shed a couple of kilos. As for her, he never saw her again after that rainy night and today he woke up to know that she was somebody else's. He let the cold numb his regret and the pain in his knees drown his sorrow. His solitude was his fate and he would embrace it. He had shared the laughs, the smiles, the arguments, the fights but there always seemed to be a part of him that was selfish. To live a life less ordinary is what he looked out for and today, no one knew where he was and what he was up to. Each day was another struggle to survive, a story to be told. From being the center of her world to be being ousted from it, he was now a renegade, a dark memory, a speck of dust on a photograph.

He was now ready, to erase her from his mind and as a last tribute to this solemn occasion, he shouts out her name, one last time. The air from his lungs comes out as a cloud as the scream echoes through the trees. Birds fly out in alarm as the words bounce off the Carpathians and back to his ears.

And then there was silence, as if someone had pressed the mute button. And in that silence, a flake of snow drops from the skies, beside the mountains, missing the trees and on his face. And this time, he felt warmth.