She opened the door of her closet, and the clothes began
tumbling out. She had stuffed it to the brim with twelve years’ worth of
clothes, and she now began examining each item.
The yellow and grey tshirt she had worn the first day they
had met and he had shyly introduced himself to her..little had she known then
that the encounter would leave such a lasting impression over the coming years
of her life.
“Pink is your color…I can’t stop staring at you when you
wear pink”. As she picked up a faded pink top, she could hear his voice clearly
in her head as though it were yesterday.
She was so besotted, so eager to please him- it was hardly a
surprise that more than half the clothes she was surrounded in now were in myriad shades
of pink.
She picked up and held a black cashmere scarf closely and
breathed in his typical aroma…a combination of nicotine and aftershave. She hadn’t worn that
scarf in six years, and she could swear that his scent was still on it.
She stepped back and tripped on a navy blue Mango dress. She
had worn it on his 22nd birthday and as she had tried to fall asleep
later that night, she had read over and over a text message from him that said “Just
wanted to tell you that you looked beautiful today”
She lunged out and pulled a white and blue salwar and felt a
sudden pang as she recalled him telling her fiercely , “Don’t ever wear that to
class again. How am I supposed to concentrate when you look so pretty!”
Entangled with the dupatta of the aforementioned salwar was a blue sweater. Even today, she could feel the warmth of his hand on her arm while holding the sleeve of the sweater, as he said in cheesy SRK style "Aur paas" and pulled her closer to himself.
At random, she picked up a plain, collared tshirt and
remembered the feel of his head against her shoulder when she was comforting
him over a low CAT percentile. She also remembered how much he hated that
tshirt and had chided her once by saying, “If we have a daughter, I will choose
her clothes. She is NOT stepping out in asexual t shirts like that one!”
From scarf to saree, every single item held some memory of
his and took her back to the times they had laughed and loved. Waves of nostalgia passed over her as she savagely picked up
each and every piece of clothing and dumped it into a bag. Within an hour, her bed
room floor was cleared of clothes.
For a long moment, she looked at a newly uploaded photo of
him and his fiancée, his arms wrapped around her possessively, both of them
beaming blissfully. She then turned and looked at her closet, which was now
completely bereft of garments.
She had cleared the cupboard of twelve years’ worth of
clothes..now if only she could free her mind from his memories and rid her heart
of the pain.
