Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Illusive Reality - Part 2


Maya sat on her aunt and uncle’s porch in a rattan armchair. She stroked the red velvet fabric of a tiny box on her lap, a gift for her 18th birthday from her aunt and uncle, well mostly aunt. She let the seconds pass, a firm grasp on the soft box, until she allowed her fingers to unhook the latch and open. Inside, she found an exquisite set, an arrangement of diamonds and emeralds on a necklace with matching, teardrop earrings. Tucked under the sparkling lace, she found a note. Her aunt wrote that the set belonged to Maya’s mother and she had loaned it to her. Maya picked up the delicate piece, lacing it in her fingers as she brought it closer to her face. She smelled the arrangement, as if hoping to pick up any lingering scent of her mother. But a whiff of mangoes from the neighbor’s porch mudded her fantasy and she travelled back to ten years ago. She tried many times to conjure up memories of her parents, the happy years, but her mind never travelled past the day her life altered forever. She couldn’t see past the blood splatter or feel beyond the sticky liquid as her parents’ faces faded from her memory and numbness assailed her heart. Even tears abandoned her as her crying eyes remained dry. In these moments, desperate for tears, she felt her body stiffen and for several hours she lost blood circulation in three of her fingers of her left hand. It always returned to normal eventually, but she struggled to bring back feeling to her cold digits.

Maya tried to evoke memories of the past decade, the years in her aunts home, but there again she failed. A fog had taken hold of her. She feared everything – her uncle’s loud voice, losing her aunt and even the train that whistled past behind their house several times a day. She constantly felt obligated to her uncle, for taking her in even though she could sense his annoyance with her presence. Maya was quite sure that he didn’t know about the necklace, otherwise it would have been sold years ago. Maya also lived with perpetual guilt – for surviving while her parent perished, her mother taking the bullet and Maya escaping it. Her guilt extended to her aunt, who fought with her husband daily to protect her niece and suffered his wrath alone. His anger boomed through their bedroom nightly and Maya noticed a new purple mark on her aunt to outshine the fading ones. Maya chose to drift through her tearless, finger numbing fog as the decade passed.

to be continued...

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