"Why does it always come to this?" she asks.
There is, as is often the case, a pregnant pause, rich in meaning but only to those that seek for somethingness in the nothingness. Basically it's silence but lousy scholars try to impregnate it with their own meanings.
"Why should you go away?" - and after a heavy sigh that's almost at the brink of breaking down, "W-w-why?" Her lips are trembling.
* * *
She was not much of an emotionally expressive character. Labeled tomboy in school, and rightly so - she smacked two gentlemen in Standard Five for no better reason than being inspired by Tom Sawyer's exploits -, she had been "boyish" ever since she stopped walking on all fours. Her mother could not withstand her tantrums for they were - in that era - so unbecoming of a girl-child. Her father, the more liberal of the two, had been able to do only so much. He knew there was no longer a way to tame her when she forged his signature on the Parent's Permission Letter for a fifteen-day trek to the Himalayas. She was the only girl in that team of ten. And this was when she was fifteen.
There was no looking back since.
For all her adventurous spirit and executive ability, like all people, she had her soft-corners and emotional moments. Today was one of them.
She looked at him again. This time, even more closely. Even more carefully.
He was battered badly, the work of time and hardships searing through almost every nook and corner of his being. Perhaps he had his own thoughts running parallel to hers. Their history went back to no more than three or may be four years. And like all such histories there had been so many memories of every conceivable human emotion they had shared.
At first, he hurt her. But it was common knowledge for all humanity that this was bound to happen. She was hurt for a week but she stuck to him and he... well, the notions of free-will did not apply to him. He had, as it were, very little choice.
The courtship would continue over roads less traveled, over mountains that knew no grass, over glorious city parks that knew nothing but grass, over a hundred rivulets. Through thick and thin forests and through shores of distant lands. Poetry was hardly his forte - he was made for other reasons - but he almost had a song for the bond that they forged over the years.
He did get hurt every so often - and so did she - for the nature of their adventure was such. And every time, she would go out on both the limbs to fix him up, to help him forget the pain and to get him back in shape for the next adventure together. Oh, how many times had this happened! They had both lost count of it.
Seams eventually split open. All good things, the saying goes, must come to an end. And here we are.
* * *
She holds him close, and as I said before, is almost on the brink of breaking down. To both of them, the years they had been together flash by. The memories play in a rapid time-lapse, occasionally stuttering due to buffer and at other fractions of seconds, play out as a montage. The impending end is near, obviously, and both seem aware of the inevitability. He more than her.
As she lets out one last sigh, she hears her dad declare: "Kilinjipona shoe'va thookki poda evlo drama panraa paaru!"
And the shoe falls into the bin.