The Torn Page
A short story
‘Where I am right now is almost taking me towards my destruction, to a point of no-return, to a point of self-loss, a place I had never imagined to be in, and therefore was not ready for it,’ he paused for a brief moment.
‘I don’t understand,’ she muttered.
‘Being with you has not made me any happier than I was. I have, in fact, experienced pain like I have never felt before. I want to be alone for sometime,’ he said.
She shot a straight look at him. He noticed the confusion in her eyes.
‘No, don’t worry. I’m not doing anything stupid. I am only walking back to the stop where I left myself. I’m going to get myself back,’ he held her hands and pressed them gently.
Before she could react, he walked away.
Angry and strong, and confused yet determined, he walked away.
She sat there watching him go until he was just a speck in the distance against the evening sun.
‘Did he ever come back to you Mom?’ he asked, holding her wrinkled hands.
‘Are you reading my diary?’ she asked feebly.
‘He didn’t right?’ he asked again.
He noticed her lips curl and couldn’t be sure if his mom was smiling or about to cry. Age puts you in an incomprehensible mixed state; features and emotions often don’t walk together.
‘What do you want to know?’ she tried to smile.
‘All your stories are about him, but this one is the last. It ends there eating into me. I’m dying to know if he came back to your life,’ he almost begged her, holding her hands and sitting at her bedside.
Her eyes were shut. Moving into a trance-like state, she had been shuttling between conscious understanding and deep sleep while in her last stages. He had quit his job and wanted to be with his ailing mom in her final days. It was only by chance that he discovered the treasures of a woman’s heart hidden in her diary. His mom had managed to keep her treasures well guarded all her life!
‘If only she stops playing this game with me,’ he smiled looking at her face, the fear of her death and her unrelenting prankish nature giving him mixed emotions.
He opened the diary again. Pages after pages of yellow were filled with a blue pen, the ink smudging with age but firm enough to tell the story of his mom’s young adulthood. Except for the end.
Hungry and mentally exhausted, he slopped down on the couch and grabbed the cookie jar carelessly lying at the corner of the couch. Even his favorite cookie tasted bitter now. It almost parched his throat as he took a bite and swallowed it. He tossed the jar back to the corner where it waited patiently to be picked up next morning.
‘Mom, are you feeling okay?’ he asked her next morning when she curled her lips at him again.
She blinked. A ‘yes’ for him.
She was awake for a few hours.
‘You know I was reading this,’ he showed her the diary again. ‘Please tell me if he came back to you. You haven’t even named him in any of your pages! Have I met him or known him well? Please Mom, don’t play around with me,’ he pleaded.
‘See my diary again,’ she smiled, her senses strong enough to understand the question he was asking.
‘Wait, what do you mean ‘see it again?’’ he asked, hurriedly opening it before her while she was still in her conscious state. He was eager to know if these stories were about his dad whom he remembered only briefly, or were these stories about someone else who had loved her but walked away.
Life had tossed a new question before him at an odd age. He wanted to keep the diary away, but the human heart is an unrelenting curious prick. He picked up the diary and flipped through it again only to find nothing new in it.
‘There’s nothi..Mom!’ he sighed. She was asleep again.
He opened the diary again, page by page, reading every story to find clues until he reached the end when something struck his eye. A missing page. A page had been torn seamlessly close to the gutter making the tear almost invisible to a normal reader.
He scanned the diary with eagle eyes. There was only one missing page, and that was the answer to his question.
He looked at his mother, debilitating every minute, and every minute moving her closer to her death. Will she wake up one more time? Will she tell him?
‘She will wake up again,’ he said, cursing himself for being selfish while his mind dwelt at the crossroads of a shallow confidence and strong fears.
He was wrong.
Sleepless after her funeral, he looked at the diary again. A beautifully aged cover encasing yellow pages pregnant with thoughts of love, presumably unspoken. He read it again and again to understand the beauty of his mother’s thoughts, her pristine heart pouring itself out in a nondescript diary. Did his father ever know of this diary?
Why was the page torn? Where is it now?
Opening the diary straight in the middle, he turned it upside down to see if the page magically fell out, and then he smiled at the idiosyncrasy of human expectations.
He closed the diary and threw it away only to see the cover turn loose on the front. He grabbed it and tried to rip it, his hopeful mind racing itself against a stubborn despair. And finally he saw it.
The ripped page. Stuck to the underside of the cover and hiding itself well, the page preserved the end to a story of endless questions. The otherwise invisible page screamed for attention before his racing heart. He held it, knowing well that his hands were shaky, and he read it.
‘Will I ever understand love, the self-effacing truant that tugs into my soul so harsh that it leaves me open and exposed? I try to hold it and never let it go, but the harder I grab it, the more it slides away from my grip; the more I pull it, the weaker it becomes and finally snaps. It laughs at me while it walks away, leaving me on my knees, weeping and wailing. It mocks me on its way out telling me how rustic I am, how undeserving I am until I stand up and decide to face my life alone. Alone. Alone with courage. Alone with a stoic heroism that cuts through every storm in its path. Alone, until that one morning when I look at the sun and see a wounded love walk back towards me.
Oh why does this love torment me? Why does this love trick me? Why does it make me weary?
I want to open my arms to him again! I want to run back to him, I want to hold him and I want to cry on his chest.
I start to walk, but I can’t step ahead! A woman drags me away. A strong woman. She pulls me back, and I follow her. She is a woman I know. She is a new wife, a new mother. I look at her and I see myself. She is the new me.’
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