Where did my old life go? It’s as if everything, every remnant of it has been snatched away, and I’m too numb even too go through the memories. Memories…how I hate that word.
I don’t want memories left of anything. All I want is for my cousins to stay. I don’t want my best friends to walk around their house looking like death…and now I realize that they were my best friends, mine and my sisters. We were a group, a group of friends that depended on one another for comfort, support, humour, company, anything and everything.
In school or at home, we were a team.
Was life like a movie, four months ago? It seems like that now…the best days of our lives were spent with each other. The endless nights we spent at each other’s house, the hilarious trips home from school, and the complaints about teachers, friends, and life in general.
And then Kanwal finally got her own car from her father who was in the last stages of cancer…and no one knew. So in the middle of making plans about how we all could finally break hell on the roads of
Lahore without the driver, my cousins lost their father.
There are just some things that you can’t believe…it all seems like a bad, bad dream. That was the day when I was the only one who could attend the phone calls because everyone was either at the hospital or was completely broken. How many times did I have to say it, to the thousands of people who called “Yes, he’s passed away…didn’t survive chemo…the burial is tomorrow”.
That wasn’t me, that wasn’t a part of my life, was it?
The worst thing was the look on my cousins’ faces. That innocent, helpless look…the mask of incomprehension and unbelief and bravery.
It was a long time ago, four months, but it seems like yesterday. Now they’re moving to Karachi…there go all the fun weekends we had, the talks, the laughter, the private jokes which could only come from a lifetime of practically living with someone. We won’t be there to hug them when they couldn’t help crying, we won’t be there for them to talk to, simply because there isn’t anyone that understands them more. We won’t be there to distract them from the worry about the business, which they’re too young to be concerned with. A whole new life in another city with loads of relatives…and to think that here, they had only us…
Why is it that the painful things are the ones you can’t stop thinking about?
Ulas said
This post is very wicked…it gives me too many thoughts…I don’t know what I am thinking but I will return later to tell you about it…a very strange one.