A ramshackle heart.
A balcony.
And monsoon.
Rain that brings with it memories of joy and love, now long gone. A breeze that carries the notes of freewheeling days, splashy puddles, raindrop-fresh giggles, and crystal clear convictions.
A day that reminds me of Before.
Before the anticlimax, Before the petering out, Before the endless vacuum.
Most things in life don't come to an end with a flash and bang, with drama and effective stage exits. They just...fade. Not with a bang, but a whimper - isn't that how the world ends?
Fleeting, fleeting love.
Oh-so-deceptive as it first makes its way into your heart and your life.
Whispering of ever-afters and rock-solid permanence.
Singing of beloved tales and classic films that seem to bear testimony to the sheer dependability of love. Lulling you into believing in the magic.
Love.
It makes the world go round, it's all you need, you can't buy it, it'll see you through the time of cholera, it is a story in itself, it's hard on the knees, it bites and bleeds and lives and dies and begs and pleads.
So when it finally happens, when it's-there-one-minute-and-gone-the-next, you feel like you've been punched in the gut and had the wind knocked out of you. It's not like it went kicking and screaming, on the heels of terrible betrayal or irreconcilable differences or one of those equally loaded phrases.
It left quietly, one morning, while you were making toast for breakfast.
So, you try desperately to retrieve it, rescue it, bring it back - at any cost.
But it's gone. For good.
The devastation is heart-stopping, because it's the aftermath of a storm so silent and insidious that you never even realized it was there. It's left rubble in its wake, a debris of pointlessness and dreams no longer dreamed, of songs that just sound like empty words, of broken promises, of dangling conversations that are punctuated with sentences that mean nothing.
It is a wreckage that reeks of absence, of failure - not of high-strung emotions like anger and grief and guilt.
A quiet collapse.
Love: a house of cards that the slightest random bit of breeze can topple with a soft swoosh.
Thus, the balcony.
And the ramshackle heart.
And a monsoon of loss.
