The parallel tracks

I slowly exerted pressure on my calf muscles and raised my body. I swayed a bit but I controlled myself and started to walk along the tracks even as the ballast hurt my feet. I stared at the tracks, when somebody held my hand.

“I Love you… Baby,” Akrit said, the word baby personifying his love towards me. There was this particular grin plastered across my face which meant I was the happiest girl in this world. Akrit clasped my hand and held it close to his heart. I could feel the warmth of his love. At the moment, I had only one wish.
Leave behind everything and walk with him down these tracks till the point where they meet. He wrapped his hand around my slender waist and pulled me closer to him when my hair doused his shoulder as my head rested on it before my eyelids dropped dead while we started to walk along.

There was a loud sound. Yet I never cared to open my eyes. I can go the distance, blindly when Akrit’s with me.

The honking became incessantly loud when I felt a force pushing me and the next moment I was off the tracks. I stared at the tracks and pushed myself along them. The knee length milk skirt which I wore was tattered. Blood oozed from the calf area and I pulled myself.
“Are you short of the slab? Can’t you see a train coming your way?” Tina hollered at me.

Ever since Akrit broke up with me, I was out of my mind. Two years of love, how could he ever forget? I have given him my heart and soul. They say, love is blind. For me, faith is also equally blind.

“I am too emotionally attached to you, Akrit,” I said and paused for a while. “You will always be there… for me?” I wasn’t questioning his faith, I thought. He looked into my eyes and held my cheeks with his fingers. “You won’t ditch me right?” I asked him. I was frightened. He was nicest guy I have ever met. And he loved me a lot too.

When you have something which you hold above everything else in this world, you always have the fright of losing it. So you are possessive of it, never let it go away from you.

“I promise,” he said with a kiss on my forehead. And we continued walking down the tracks as there were tears in my eyes, tears of happiness that cascaded down my cheeks. I wiped the tears off my cheeks. I was always frightened that I would lose him and so did I. Not that I never had faith in him, but that’s the way of love.
Tina, my best friend is trying to console me. “I will never let him marry another girl,” I said.

Initially, I was angry with him. But as days passed by, the ephemeral anger subdued and the abysmal love surfaced. I missed him. I loved him so much.

“The tracks are a way of thinking in life. Both the tracks should run parallel. From either side, there should be love. Only then a journey called life becomes meaningful on a train called love. He doesn’t like you anymore. Whatever you do, he isn’t going to come back. And you will also forget the pain in a few months if not years,” Tina delivered her speech and continued, “So trash these feelings of yours and resume your journey on these tracks called life.”

“But they tend to converge as they approach the horizon. My love for you will die only at that point,” he said with a smile.
“Poetic, huh?” I raised my brow.
“Romantic,” he replied.
“And you will be very well dead at that point where it dies,” I looked straight into his eyes.
There was a lot of commotion around. I have reached the platform but I still walked from between the tracks. People were aghast to see a girl in a skirt drenched in blood walk along the tracks.
Drops of blood trickled down the knife.
“What are you doing?” Tina rushed towards me. I just slashed my wrists.
“Look at this…” I showed her my wrist.
Everybody could see was a speeding train coming along the tracks.
I told this story to my husband as we waiting for the train, on the platform.
“How do you know her story so well?” he asked me. I worked as a psychologist.
“And you mean to say she’s dead?” he asked me one more and kept bombarding, “What happened to Tina?”
“Tina is an alter ego of her. Tina never existed. It was her own self which kept convincing her that she should go on with her life even after the break up,” I replied.
“What happened to Akrit?” he asked.
“Akrit’s dead body was found a few miles from the station. Police ascertained that he was stabbed by a woman, most probably the same girl. But she was never found again.”
“Why did she slit her wrists? She killed herself?” he said winking at me, “the last one, please”
“Every one else were of the same opinion,” I said as I rolled up my sleeve and looked at the scars on my wrist.
The train slowly pulled itself along the tracks and I resumed my journey.