The notification pings – 2 minutes away. I stare at the screen until the digits blur. Two minutes. Two hundred. It makes no difference. Time stopped mattering when I realized all my days were just carbon copies of each other, one more faded than the last.
I mount the bike without greeting. The rider accelerates before I find my balance. The city rushes past in a smeared watercolor of old buildings and colorful, dusty billboards.
Nobody dares to stop. Nobody even looks. The city swallows everything – the dead, the living, the barely breathing.
The office smells of broken dreams and coffee. My keyboard has a missing ‘E’ key. But it does not bother me. I haven’t made friends here, and I intend not to.
“Deadline’s in an hour,” the manager barks, and I keep typing without thinking.
For lunch, I ordered Biryani. But it tasted like regret. I ate it alone in the kitchen, overlooking the window, watching the crows fight over a scrap near the dumpster. A cat tries to paw down the crow but fails.
As my eyes ventured to the horizon, a plane carved a pale scar in the sky. But there’s no one to tell me which plane it is. A bead of sweat rolls down my cheek- or maybe it’s a tear. I couldn’t tell anymore.
The ride home is always worse with traffic at every corner. Sometimes, I think the city has too many people. Everyone is in a hurry but seems to be going nowhere.
Her absence sat inside me like a dead stone. And in no time, the lights around me started to blur, and sorrow rained down my face.
The Bykea guy doesn’t notice. Why would he? I’m just another faceless passenger, another being to transport from one meaningless point to another.
The next day, I saw a grey cat with a thick tail resting under the tree outside our office. How could it be that you love something without ever exchanging a word? And how could it be that everything beautiful doesn’t last forever?
Later that day, I turned in to resign. They think a great tragedy has unfolded for me to leave such a lucrative job.
They stared at me as if I had killed someone. And indeed, I did.
Outside, the same grey cat watched me go. The city did not notice. But for the first time in a long time, I did.
I also noticed that my love was just like paper planes.
One thing about paper planes is how short their lives are and they are so easy to crumble, with such little flight. And so easily replacable.
It was hard for my paper plane to compete with a real one, the kind that you always wanted.
Is that why you crumbled it, tore it apart because it meant nothing to you? And left me to mourn the torn pieces of what once was. Left me wondering if it ever had a chance.
But deep inside, I knew it never stood a chance,
my paper plane against his.
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