A NUMBING NIGHT

Chill. 

Horror.

.

.

.

and Helplessness. I'd never known myself to ever use these word with such gravity as now. For the first time in life, I felt so feeble, so weak.  Or at least that's what the baying kennel brought me to think. 

It was late into the night, with true colors shedding from everything around, except the neon street lamps that I have now come to see as silent spectators to the night-time quiet.

I saw her jump. There was this girl I had a silent crush on, all these years...Her bearing was ever placid, had a steady gaze, countenance gracefully still. I somehow got over her some time ago, but knew that there was something different in her that couldn't be explained. And I saw it. 

It was a three storey spring. I stood there watching. From the opposite terrace. Stood there still. Silence and then a crisp thud so sudden that made me wince. Why was it so ordained that I be witness to the end of her last earthly deed? I forgot where I was. I grew numb in my legs. I'd all along been sitting beside the Sintex water tank, carelessly prying here and there.

O! how I wish I'd made myself evident. Could that have delayed her plans or even changed her mind?-at least for the night?

I felt I was also part of the scheme: A karmic bond engulfing me into the madness of the night.

I fell asleep there itself, on the cold terrace floor....to find myself waking to the piercing lament of a woebegone woman, not too faint amidst the honking of the morning traffic. Yet another dawn, with a thousand men working their way to their daily bread, blissfully oblivious of  the sorrows of the distressed.

Never shall I climb those stairs up again...At least for a long time to come.