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Prose

Sine Die

Asmita Sharma

Here I am. Inhaling, remembering, forgetting, repeating.I have been stuck here, inside this house for a long time. Don't ask me how long it has been. I haven't been able to tell. I have aged but don't even look the part, nor does this house. We co-exist in this solitary confinement beyond which a huge world operates. Now, I wouldn't say I live here alone, not entirely. She lives with me. A jolly girl who at least doesn't go the extra mile to flatter me. Despite no resemblance I naturally assumed that she must be his daughter otherwise she wouldn't have been able to enter the premises of this isolated world here without any resistance from the house. She had once uttered my name and then, nothing. You humans don't know how to communicate effectively. I have been pondering about words that humans speak, aren't they just too fickle? They never speak the entirety of it, never express themselves well. The ones who don't are too reticent, too arrogant, too infallible to be alive yet the ones who do are deemed to be extravagant and chatty. I don't understand humans. Why must they keep deducing everything all the time? I was a lost little kitten once. For many moons, I had to recognize a cardboard box as my house. For many suns, I had to stealthily traipse ahead on my haunches into the diner owner's backyard. Kids loved to feed me, play with me but it wasn't enough to treat me as their own. My mother raised me alone. I never knew my father. A mother’s love is aggravatingly deep, she gave up everything for me, even her life. Humans are fickle with their wishes and choices. Now that I'm living here, under a roof, for a split second I would like to agree that he wasn't too self-fulfilling. At least not in front of me. He took me in. He fed me until I was plump. He nurtured me back to health. It was many moons ago. On a rainy afternoon, I had collapsed in front of him, in the boundary of this dilapidated house and the sparkly street, where he stood contemplating whether to enter the premises. He picked me up and went inside. He gave me a bath in lukewarm water, wrapped me in a towel and hugged me as if I'm his dearest. It was always fun to watch him coddle me but then again, he would spontaneously burst into tears that would incessantly cascade down his cheeks for hours. In those times, I was never a help. It was almost as if I didn't exist in his life, in his memory. Quietly sitting there, I would look at my faithful servant, bawl his eyes out and howl like a mother wolf who has recently lost her newborn wolfcub. Had I known what was going on back then, I would've definitely left him. Even now, I keep failing to remember that he is a human too. After his departure, I tried to decipher every single one of them. All I could realise was SINE DIE. Did he really want me to live here indefinitely? I yearn for nothing more than to get out of this house. Oh, where are my manners? I’m Nini and soon, it will be my fiftieth birthday!

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