A surreal account of decaying matter.

If I could recall one random thought from my life, just out of the blue, it would be that I often used to wonder how my death would be. The idea of death has always amazed me; it is not that I fantasized about it or was eager to die, leaving behind everything that I have build in my life. All those memories and the lovely friendships that I have cultivated over the years of me being alive, will that be gone in just a puff, or would it be something that the people are yet to understand? Is death an allegory or just a metaphor of something very grandeur that our sentient brain is too young to understand? Is it a grand scheme applied only to this spinning rock in a billion-year-old universe or is it proof that nihilists are indeed true and there is no meaning to life and eventually we die a boring and meaningless death?

By now, I guess the reader must have realized that I am not alive anymore, and don't worry, the films lie a lot, by reading this I won't have any access to your soul for all eternity. I guess the afterlife doesn't work as it does in the movies. Also, if you are thinking it to be a suicide note then I am so happy to disappoint you because it is not. Instead, think of it as a message or rather a precious memory on a page that I have locked inside a bottle, and one day while you were enjoying some drinks with your friends by the seashore, you came across this bottle. This memory is so fragile that it could be erased from my mind in just a squall yet so strong that I felt it when I was on my deathbed, huffing and unknowingly squinting away from all that was trying to keep me alive.

I used to be a painter when I was alive, living in my thirties, barely floating through the expenses of life. It was the time of a pandemic, scientists blamed it on a virus and named it Covid-19 and the whole country was under lockdown. The streets that were earlier buzzing with people and traffic horns, were now in disarray; even the dogs had gone quiet in the streets. I survived miraculously the first wave of this pandemic but unfortunately succumbed to my death at the second wave, despite all the necessary steps that I took to stay alive. Someone has really said it true that we can never be too careful. If my brain could jiggle up for one last time, maybe I would have tried to narrate the whole story/memory personally to you. Now, as a lying cadaver, I am guessing I am stone-cold, maybe floating in the vastness of pure blackness, while the little maggots slowly break me apart bit by bit, inch by inch.

So, here it goes........

That day, the sun was without a doubt, struggling to cast its rays through the maze of foggy aberration. It was a gloomy day. Nonetheless, I woke up loving the day; the morning gave me an unbridled joy because I was able to finish 0ne of my incomplete portrait. The colors and the strokes of the brush all came naturally to me on that day. I was on my balcony, legs folded, with a cup of ginger tea and a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, drawing whatever came to me after finishing my work. The streets were silent as it was not the time for anybody to hustle outside and the police made sure of it. I was at the last sip of my tea when I was awestruck by a view. My heart jumped a beat, it glowed like the fireflies in the night of a breezy spring. I was rendered unconscious as if I had been arched into another subconscious state of mind. The mind of a thirty-year-old painter juggled, and suddenly the clouds cleared the path to allow some rays to glitter at such a subliming moment.

A lady it was, a lady was all that I saw, maybe somebody diffracted from my past memories. The moment was no less than the taste of my sweet ginger tea. My body conformed to this situation like a moth stuck to the aura of fire, waiting for its last hours as it can't release itself. I was consequently on the seventh heaven and also on the seventh hell. I was standing behind the steel railings of the 5th floor of my apartment, my body dissolving in a sweet coma. I heard my mother singing morning prayers, and also I could hear the sirens frequenting down the road, and in between all of this I was surprised I could hear my heartbeat, but I questioned myself if it really was a heartbeat at all, because it was so erratic. I couldn't really tell.

She stood on the road with her thick damp hair, her white nude back slowly caressing the sun's rays, and her figure bending the light. For a few seconds, her shadow was all that I could see and it was dancing to the sun's unsettled rays. It was, however, satisfying to me, satisfying to my eyes, which had been dormant and soulless for many years. My hands itched to draw her if only for once I could see her face. A surreal agony sang to my heart, trying to force my emotions to a piece of carbon that was ready to be dragged on a canvas for another masterpiece. Suddenly, a butterfly sat on her wet grey hair, and it was so romantic the way the butterfly was enjoying a living poetry. I imagined myself to be that butterfly who was lucky enough to be hovering around her, and I kissed her hair. A gentle breeze slightly drifted me away but the stubborn wings flapping from strong infatuation flew me back to her, wandering again above her with a sizzling naked feeling. If I had been Romeo and had seen her, I'm sure I would have flicked those ancient pages of my heart and rendered these feelings for another eternity.

Till now it was only a minute or two but it felt like ages.

A bus with a few passengers had just arrived and stopped beside her. A crowd of few was trying to board the bus and in the midst of all those people, I lost her. My eyes were whipped out of her magic and were suddenly thrown into reality with a pair of old goggles. I saw a lot of people but not her, and I lost a lot of patience searching for her. The bus had left with those people but she was not there at that spot. For a brief while, I believed she had boarded the bus and headed for the location where she was supposed to be. I slumped back in my chair with a grimace on my wrinkled face, scratched my head with the pencil, and searched for her through the steel railings as much as I could. But suddenly I saw her, standing there again at the exact same spot, puffing a cigarette like a vintage model who is just out of an opulent cabaret. I saw her face and when I saw her, I felt something soothingly idyllic about it that I wish to not describe to you. This is something that I would like to keep to myself. But she was as beautiful as one can be. All I want to say is that with that cigarette playing between her fingers and the rays romancing with the nicotine in the air, she looked like an aesthetic portrait made on a 16mm film; that grain and the aura preserved in the chemical picture was just a wonderful closure of a romance and an art naked to the eyes of an ignoramus dullard.

Another bus came with a few passengers in it and just before she boarded it, she threw the cigarette butt and she looked up. She saw me, smiled, and then left, I didn't get any time to react to it. With an obnoxious feeling, I covered my heart and my body with a veil of uncertainty, and despair was ready to call my exit from this short film, but that butterfly never died and was mingling with the feelings unparalleled. I wished if I could have known, I would have said her name out loud. Maybe she heard me and that's why she looked up or maybe she knew that I was looking at her from the beginning; I guess I would never know. This was it, the moment, the memory ended in a flash and I was left on my balcony questioning the drama of my reality. This is the memory that I do not want to lose; this memory warps me in all the bliss of life that I could muster, despite the fact that it was short-lived.

But now as I am drifting through the cold nothingness, I am wondering if this is real. Is it true that I'm dead, or have I been sleeping for a very long time? But isn't sleep just a parody of death? Perhaps, my decaying brain is conning me regarding my emotions and feelings. Will it matter now if it is not true at all? Have I become a frigid corpse that is flickering between the real and reel in the realm of absolute nihility. Do I even have the right to question? I wonder. But she is gone, I don't know where, but she certainly fueled a heart with another joyous beating, and memory forever sculpted in the vicinity of life.