She had a marriage to attend. She stood before the mirror, trying her best to look “beautiful.” She hadn’t felt beautiful in a long while. She was struggling hard with her wrinkles, those scars and puffy eyes and that untamed hair, all of which had its own tale to tell. An untold tale but not an unheard one. Atleast not unheard by me. I had heard her tale loud and clear. Not because I wanted to, but because her cries and scream of agony, pain, despair, of desire and love were unbearably deafening for my sensitive ears.
Now, as she stood before the mirror, I realised how she had slowly aged. I held her rough comforting hands. She looked at me with affection- the kind I have known from no one else but her. I fixed myself on her puffy eyes that narrated stories of her sleepless nights when she has cried herself to sleep. Nights she has spent struggling to survive. Nights when she’s looked at world like a Bermuda triangle from where there’s no coming back. That marshy land where howsoever hard you struggle for survival, you end up drowning yourself into that unwanted territory. Life was similar for her. To her, her struggles felt never ending.
Her wrinkles spoke of the innumerable responsibilities she was unwillingly made to carry. The burden she never signed up for.
Those scars were her heart’s aching every time it shattered when her expectations met reality.
I must have stared at her for long when she suddenly jerked me out of my thoughts. Out of the life’s aching she had borne deep inside. I looked at her again, this time only to realise how beautifully she had covered her face- those wrinkles, lines, scars and puffy eyes, with everything artificial.