Naathu,
While people have deathbeds and death-wishes, I have a death-window. The nurse told me that you left me the lilies this morning. I am feeling much better than I have felt since the last evening, but I do not know if I will be awake when you return. Read your note about the tour to Hyderabad for three days. Do the drivers have a board on which they greet your arrival with 'Swaminathan M'? Or, do the office folks send a 'Naathan' over for you too?
The nurse has dared to call this a 'piece of paper'. I had first refused. Then I agreed sweetly, thinking, the contents would have mattered more to you -- now that papers must only mean prescriptions and bills. This can thus be a happy difference. Like your flowers -- such a world of their far own -- even beside the saline tubes, the stray medicines and the vital charts. And the pen, Naathu, god the pen! Is is a blue leaking ball point! The kinds which leak into an additional blot at the beginning of 'b', or, like caramel, nag from the strike of 't' to the next word.
What had happened that evening, I do not wish to recall, except that while my ears seemed to shut out the entirety of outside while filling my withins with a world of screams, I could only hope for you. No, not for any god, nor think of any prayer, or rush to the emergency number listed on my phone. Hey! Where is my phone anyway? I did not know what time it was and was only wishing that you would ring the bell at that moment, or give me a call right then.
When you did, I knew I would live to tell this tale (even if on the other side of a two-day old hospital sheet).
That come what may, and at whatever point in life, some decisions prove to be the best that we have ever stood by. My eyes feel strained and my fatigue hasn't yet be won over. But I can't wait for that drive back home with you. I hope you bring back a box of local bakery cookies for our morning tea.
Living anew,
Chitra.
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