An ode to Love and Loss

(This is a short story I wrote last month at a beautiful place as part of a writing marathon. So it deserves to be shared on this blog not because it's a great work, but because YOLO and so does this blog! hehe.)

It was 2 a.m. and she was still reading. Those who had known her for a long time knew she had this fondness for written word. You'd often find her arguing that conversations killed the 'life and light' in her. Besides books, her favourite companions were plants – both dead and alive. She watered them all, protecting her naive belief that what once lived can never really perish.

She lived with him. He was her complete opposite, but despite all arguments and differences, they knew they belonged to each other. Those were her lines. He, on the other hand, called her his favourite old habit – dearest one.

"Who are you reading at this hour?" he asked. "Premchand," she replied without even looking at him. "I used to read him in school, some ten years back, and he wrote some, I don't know, a hundred years back?" – This wasn't the first time he mocked (nearly mocked) her for reading writers long dead. She knew him from school; they were old classmates and had a very clear memory that he used to bunk every Hindi literature class. But she didn't say anything because she was too busy collecting all these accusations and ironies for her next blog. She used to write those dead blogs that no one would ever read, not even him. He asked her to write short, bite-sized content that people could casually read in metros or during lunch breaks. But she always told him that she wrote to find coherence. She had to put her thoughts into words in order to understand what she really meant. He called her silly – the silly girl he loved since fifth grade! She is getting better, he thought.

It was a stormy evening. All her plants were destroyed and she knew now they were all dead. She put them in a pot and did a funeral for her plants. At least that's what she told him. He knew she had a tough time bearing a sense of loss, but this seemed as if she had lost her sanity. She was struggling, he knew. She told him that life is there even in the dead – believe it or not. The invisibility didn't take away the fact that they were once alive; she elaborated herself as much as she could.

‘You eat sprouts, they are also dormant initially, why don't you just agree with me once?’

‘Sprouts have a life hidden, they signify birth. Dead won't rise from their corpses, Sana. It's been five years since our child died. Enough.’

The room fell silent. Sana and her dead plants were stunned by what he just said. It was true she couldn't deal with loss, but the child whom he narrated Premchand for months in the hope that they would build a life was dead – it didn't sit well with her.

She put her sobbing aside. She pulled out her trunk of old journals, the ones she had been writing since she was 13. Her old crushes, silly ramblings, weird dreams and whatnot – made her laugh and grieve simultaneously – for a self that was no longer there. Or maybe, it was just hidden behind all the layers of time and life?

She found her old flowers hidden in her journals. They were also dead and wrinkled. But those were the flowers that he gave her – farewell 2010. Oh, that day, those flowers – the silently whispered, all those memories rushing back to her in an instance. She re-read his old letters and all the old thoughts she had of him. "Dear diary, he seems cute but he always disagrees with me," she read this aloud to him. "You have always been like this to me, mean and rude." He too laughed with her. It had been a long time since she laughed her heart out. She was giddy and was almost like a high school girl who just fell in love. Her journal had a part of her intact. It was almost as if she went to a sacred place to pray. Reading her old voice and dramatic letters to future Me #1, 2, 3... had an impact on her no therapy ever did. She was here again – in blood and flesh.

So that day she confessed everything to him – all her fears, doubts, and pain. She told him about a recurring dream she had been having all this while.

"I used to see a board in a dark room and a spotlight was on the board. It seemed like an interrogation room. But I couldn't read the middle letters. It was like, 'YOU L---E'.

And I used to think it meant 'YOU LOSE'. I thought it was a divine indication that my child had to die to fail me, to defeat me. Like a prophecy. The universe was trying to defeat me.

But today, I realised it was, 'YOU LIVE'!

All this while I had to live. It was life, the force of life which was eternal. My old diary had the voices I grew up with and this whole day it felt I had a round-table conversation with all versions of me. And all those versions of me loved me and told me, 'Sana, in these moments of abysmal pain and despair, YOU LIVE, YOU ALWAYS LIVE'."

He smiled hearing all this. She is back, dear diary, he wrote.

Asmita

March 2026