The Long Upward Journey

This was it. Things had hit rock bottom. All that she had ever strived for had been taken away from her; she had nothing and no one to turn to. If she dropped dead at right that instant, no one would care. If she dropped dead…

She vacated the house that she had been living in since she could remember and walked towards the rickety elevator. It always made her feel claustrophobic as a little girl. It was a small metallic enclosure of sorts with only an embedded electric fan on the top. In the more recent times, it had become her sanctuary; it provided her a few moments from the prying and judging eyes of the world, all to herself.

As the elevator staggered to a halt in front of her, she entered in with all her belongings. As she hit the button to go on to the roof of the building, an elderly man put his foot between the closing doors. She silently scowled as he entered the already cramped space. She wouldn’t get some peaceful moments even during the last minutes of her disappointing life.

As the elevator shut noisily, the old man smiled at her. There was something about his toothy smile that made her uncomfortable. She had never seen him around here. Then she noticed that he hadn’t hit the button of the floor he wished to go to. She nodded towards the buttons, reminding him. He promptly selected the ground floor. She glared at him. Why did he get in when the lift was going up?

The elevator slowly lurched upward. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. She was distinctly sure that the old man was closely looking at her. She turned back aggressively to confront him. He gave her a hearty smile again as if he had known her forever and was chiding her for what she was about to do. She shook the ridiculous thought out of her head. As she turned to look at the door again, the elevator staggered to a halt. She almost swore aloud and then stopped herself. Tears of regret welled up in her eyes. She had lost everything. It would have been easier to accept if she had someone to blame, but she didn’t. Everything that she did in life was her own decision. And every decision had proved to be a failure.

She thought of the man standing behind her. She had hoped to reach his age someday, have a stable life, have someone to wake up next to, have a family, children, and grandchildren even. She was a rebel but always foresaw some kind of a conversion to a normal life when she reached her middle ages. Now she was too broken and too damaged to continue going. The only chance she had was to start afresh and that couldn’t be until she finished this story.

A sound of shuffling behind her interrupted her thoughts. She turned to see the old man kicking around a tiny pebble in a corner with visible glee. She smiled weakly in spite of herself and thought of her own grandfather. She clearly remembered the afternoon he died. She had insisted on riding her elder sister’s bicycle had had fallen off it, breaking both her wrist and the handle of the bicycle. She lost track of how long she sat there crying in the middle of the road. What she remembered was how her grandfather picked her up, dusted her skirt and chastised her for not getting up and coming back home on her own. She hoped that he wasn’t watching her right now. If he was, she hoped he knew that she had tried her best to get up this time.

Looking closely at the old man, she could almost count his years on his wrinkled face. There were shadows of immense pain in his eyes but those could not take away from his hearty smile. She flushed when he saw her staring at him. She immediately looked away. Without a word, he placed a hand softly on her forehead. She tried to remember the last time someone had done that to her, but couldn’t. The feel of his calloused hands told her that he hadn’t lived a particularly comfortable life. Just as she was about to start feeling sorry for him, she realised with a pang that he had lived his life. He was not the one headed to the roof of the building.

The elevator suddenly jolted back to life. All the pain that she had hidden within her under the guise of strength surged out of her and she sunk to the floor, weeping. As the elevator wobbled to a halt, she got up and stumbled out, dragging her luggage behind her, though she couldn’t care less for those things. That was grimly amusing considering she had spent all her life chasing those very things. With the closing doors of the elevator, she heard a very faint voice saying, “It’ll be alright.”

She walked slowly to the edge of the roof, remembering her childhood when she spent days exploring, looking for new routes. Thinking back, her life so far also felt like those days now. Only, she fell harder, the wounds were deeper, and took way too long to heal. But those falls hadn’t stopped her from exploring, so why were they stopping her now? As the wind blew through her hair, it seemed to clear her mind of all the muddled thoughts. She dared to smile again as she looked down at the city and the numerous small alleys that she hadn’t explored yet. As she was glancing around, she saw the old man standing at the gate of the building, looking up at her and giving her that same toothy smile.

Picture credits - http://subjunctive.net/photoblog/2006/rooftop-view.jpg