The Scariest Part

Sometimes, she would laugh at his fondness for her. Proud, happy, and ecstatic deep inside, she would outwardly ridicule the way he claimed her love and attention. She would make fun of the cheesy lines he spoke, she would call him ‘drama queen’ when he role-played Devdas and Romeo, and she smiled smugly when he told her that he would die if they parted. But she cherished him more than her own life, and everything he said or did made her love him more than before. Every time a meeting plan failed because of something at her end, he would joke, “I’ll give you a phone-call after your husband comes home…” and she would say the same when the story went the other way round; and then they would laugh out hard. Their love was intense and deep… though it was extramarital and illicit and forbidden and adulterous to the world. But for her, it was pious and true -in fact essential to her life. . It was telepathic … soul-quenching! She was not dramatic or filmy, when she said, “…the scariest part is that you are becoming a habit…” She was absolutely right. So is her psychiatrist, when he tells her that the scariest part is that her body pain is an outcome of her broken habit of ‘him’; that her body cramps are real but not physical. She has to either bring him back into her life or let him go completely. But how can she bring him back when he has gone away at will? And how can she let him go completely, without letting her heart break? How can she let him go completely, while she is still breathing? How can she let him go completely as long as she is sane and sentient? The psychiatrist says he can refurbish her brain cells and facilitate letting him go completely, and consequently cure her body. But she knows that it’s not about the brain... but about the soul! It’s her soul that needs refurbishment… and that’s the scariest part!    

- parastish