Epilogue

Cox’s Bazar sea beach.

Arif was sitting all alone. His tears were flowing like torrent of a disobedient river. He couldn’t hold them back. The setting sun of the crimson horizon was conveying solidarity with his doleful life. The consummation of the sky and the deep blue sea gave birth to a new twilight. But Arif sat there; knees folded and hands crossed; this melancholy beauty of the ocean had cast a spell on him. A heavy sigh of grief tore through his chest. Fragmented thoughts were coming to his mind like the dispersed flying seagulls of the western sky; nothing else to care for, no sweet home to return to; just himself and this lonely, parched world. A treacherous love came to his life like the first dew of an autumn morning; glistering in the golden sunshine; but left him broken to smithereens in a one-eyed monster cyclone.

“O Ocean! Bear witness of a death; death of a divine love,” whispered Arif to the gentle breeze of the evening ocean.

“What did I want from you? I didn’t ask for anything but love; pure, unconditional,” his complain was to the moon playing hide and seek behind the clouds.

“Then tell me! Why…why did you have to hurt me so much? Did you not at all understand what I had to say in those SMSs? Ria…..you heartless woman....you played with me all along!” he could still remember how much emotion was hidden behind those black, small characters. He poured his heart in those SMSs- they were not just a few SMSs; they were his creation, his art, his life. He gave birth to them. Every single SMS was now coming back to him like the searing pain of labor.

Arif’s tears were like the foaming waves of the perturbed ocean gushing to the shore. He looked at the little bottle resting nicely on his palm. Then he turned his eyes to the maddening beauty of the mother nature- the ocean, the sky for the last time; he felt the waft of breeze as if it wanted him to stay a bit longer. He closed his eyes- there was no pain….only a thick black void….

Arif’s residence, Dhanmandi, Dhaka.

Arif’s mother sat beside the dead body; silent. She was holding a hand of her dearest son. She kept looking at her son; bewildered.

Speechless tears dropped on Arif’s lifeless eyes.

(It is a short story. any resemblance to real life is unintentional. It is a of fiction.)