She was lying there, for days, she was kept in ice, waiting, she prayed for water. She knew it would come, it always had. Water was there, but frozen. Close enough to see but too far to touch her.

The fish’s tail was visible outside, even in all that steam rising out of the vessel.
Water had found her. It had reached her. It returned but only enough for cooking the fish. It was all different now. Water was angry, simmering, steaming. It spilled a little over the edge of the vessel, as if it was trying to get the fish out with it.

The water tried to revive her, but she didn’t smile like before. She didn’t play with the moving water the way she used to. The belief in her eyes was gone. That look of complete trust, was gone.
Water grieved so hard it disappeared into the air. When the boiling water was holding her again, the dead eyes seemed to say, i did good.

Water, water everywhere, what a place to be.
Who wants to drink it, when you’re not there to see?

Read more from After(words)?

No one told us, but it had quietly begun.
I don’t see them sitting with me.
Instead of a chabudai, there is a soban, a small floor-table meant for one.
I am having my breakfast alone. I make burnt lunch. I eat hope for dinner, the hope of the future I see. And I hear the bird outside, chirping alone, slowly, as if it is grieving too.

The garden is still there. No grass yet. Just dry soil.
I draw faces in the sand with my fingers.
Faces of the people I thought would sit around my table.
And then I cry over them, not to wash them away.
To make the soil harden around their faces, so they can stay a little longer.

I am not in a hurry.

Read similar pieces from After(words)?

So do you trust a fish?
when you already know stories that to survive, fishes eat each other.
But she turns, certain that I’ll follow, and i do.

I look at my reflection in the water before leaving with her and i see I never stay one colour. Some days I’m yellow in happiness. Some days I’m red in anger. Some days I’m red in love. Other days, I’m blue.
She says she likes my colours, so before meeting her i wish like a kid, “make me white, just like her, today”.
She likes her white colour too, but never wishes to be another colour, she exists as if no one has ever asked her to become someone else.

It always begins with us together in the water.
We lift our mouths above the surface, just for some seconds, before sinking back in.
In those few seconds, we see the grass beyond the river and the clouds that look like they belonged to July.

Swimming our way through, we reach there.
We reach the place we found together some days back, she likes the reef there, I like the way the sun slips through the water. There the current barely moves, the river keeps flowing, but there, it almost looks still.
Every time we were there, doing nothing, I asked too many questions, about the water, about the mountains, about the world outside. About her. She answered only the ones she wanted to. I noticed the questions she left behind and made silence feel like an answer.

I revolved around her, more than she ever wanted me to, until it was night and we had to return to the deeper water. The darker shade of blue and the night used to scare me.

The deeper the water became, the smaller I felt. So we stayed.
I slept beside her, and sometimes our fins touched. It felt like home. Home that made me red with love and with anger too. Strangely it made me uneasy even when I felt safe, it reminded me of the home I left without really knowing I was leaving. With all these thoughts in that moment i saw my reflection in the eyes of my shiny white fish, sleeping right next to me, I saw that I was white, I couldn’t believe that I was white, I always wanted that. So I slept happily, after all my wish had come true!

Morning is cruel.
I have woken up, everything is gone, ruined.
The stories I’ve heard about fishes, flash in front of me.
So did I eat my own white fish yet?
Or did she?
Do we carry pieces of each other that we forget if it’s me or her?

Read more from After(words)?

There can never be nothing left. Something always stays behind. The shape it leaves you in. And a thousand feelings that don’t know where else to go.

And then, there is this moment. The moment when you’ve lost, and all that’s left to do is sit. But when you sit with it, grief sits with you, guilt sits with you.
Love pretends not to be there.
And hope quietly pulls up a chair right next to your table, like it missed the part where everything fell apart.

You want to stand up. Leave the table but grief is still holding your hand. You want hope to stand up and come to you. But you don’t know if it will come to you or not!

Maybe that’s why I like the last page of books.
They never pretend the story ended, just because the pages did.

So, just like an afterword page in a book,
I believe in believing.
That there is always a table right next to you. waiting for you to see it.

Keep reading more from After(words)?