The room claims darkness, the air gloats silence, there is a flawless atmosphere. In spite of all these she finds herself tossing and turning in her bed with her head beneath the pillow and her eyes clenched shut. She’s been striving vainly for a proper nap, probably from many hours. Whenever she closes her eyes, his face whirls around her, his voice flows in the air and she becomes restless. 

Time swifts away so fast: the guy she met yesterday was an integral part of her. Everything happened so quickly, she was still in chaos. She remembers the witless conversation they had had and bursts into laughter, but he isn’t  there to accompany her. She never knew that love is such alluring sentiment until he came in her life. Turning the light and cheering up the moth that must have been waiting eagerly for it, she begins to search for something. She wanders around the room as if looking for something lost.

She eventually takes a piece of paper in her hand and starts reading it:

“All that is gold doesn’t glitter

Not all those who wander are lost   

The old that is strong doesn’t wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost

From the ashes a fire shall be woken

A light from the shadow shall spring,

Renewed shall be blade that was 

broken.”

It was a piece of paper he handed her the last time they met. It was from one of his beloved novels. Her night went sleepless with coffee strains and thoughts of him. Her phone rang, and after receiving the call she was in a daze.

She stands in front of the ICU with a racing heartbeat, dry mouth, eyes teeming with tears—hand trembling and sweat all over her body. She looks like a betrayed solider in a war. She was startled—for the first time in her whole life in a way that she was unable to cope with her desolation. She became insensible as well as impotent as she observed the circumstances about her. After a while she sits by the chair and starts to remember the first day they met, the argument they had had, apparently for no reason, and she remembered how she fought with him for little things, how he changed her life and today how he is going to leave her in the dark corner to cry alone. 

Abruptly the door of ICU opens. The doctor comes out of the room and says “there is no hope that he will survive.” Those words echo. She feels as if the whole world is about to vanish. She rushes 

inside the room and hurls herself into his arms. She sobs like a baby and shouts as if she were insane . She holds his hand, looks into his almond-shaped, innocent eyes; she wishes time could stop and stretch it to infinity. But she forget that time is a dedicated marathon runner, that it won’t stop for anybody. She places her head on his arm with her tears dripping down her cheeks and whispers—”I want you to stay.”

Karki is an eleventh-grader at Reliance Int’l College, Kathmandu