The Proposal

"How do I tell her?", he thought. "How do I summon up the strength to walk up to her and let her know that there will never be any other woman for me? How do I ask her to be mine? What do I have, that..he doesn't?"
He was sitting outside, waiting for her, a rose in his hand. His emotions had overwhelmed him, leaving him incapable of rational thought. He started to write, in a futile attempt to relieve the tension that had been building up inside him.
"Will she marry me? Will there be children? Will there be a family waiting for me to return home? Will I willingly put myself through the crushing rigors of an unsatisfying job, because providing for the family I love so much makes it all worthwhile, meaningful, and even desirable? Will I get to sacrifice myself for someone's sake, for the incomparable feeling of being loved, of being wanted by someone, someone who understands? Someone who knows what it's like to live the way I do. Someone, who loves me, for who I am, and what I could be."

Stirred by the scent, he looked down at the freshly cut rose, with a growing sense of unease. He felt it was a failure of his imagination. He could not think of anything else to get her besides this kitschy gesture of love. The realization that there was nothing unique about his gift, or his desire to impress her kept battering the last remnants of his self-confidence. But he still had to try. There would be no turning back after this. Life had left him bruised and defeated to the point where he couldn't feel very much pain anymore, and any pain he had to suffer was nothing new. His mind had had ample time to accustom its machinations to the brutal torture his conscience made him endure, ever-present reminders of an unfulfilled existence.
The only emotions he still felt capable of were the crushing sense of loneliness that was now a part of his being, and a longing to be loved, which had stayed with him through everything life had thrown at him. He had tried to crush it with his despair, but it only grew. He was not meant to be a pessimist. Just another sensitive, hopeless romantic being mercilessly crushed by an impossibly difficult life, and a completely indifferent universe.
He had spent a lifetime alone waiting for her to come to him, and she hadn't. She had chosen another man instead. He had overheard her talking to her friends about him. There was some mention of being loved and being perfect for each other, and knowing each other's thoughts even before the sentences were uttered. A feeling of belonging, a sense of home, warmth, and trust. But he didn't believe it. He wouldn't let himself believe it. It would be the death-knell of all his hopes.

All the signs pointed to an imminent rainstorm.The sky was overcast, and there wasn't even the slightest hint of a breeze stirring the drooping flags that were hanging at half-mast around the plaza. He looked at them, increasingly perturbed, sensing the despair that hung heavily in the air. Was this a premonition of how things would go? Life's warning that only defeat waited at the end of this path?
Tears of desperation started to well up in his eyes. Still, he could not leave. He could not go back to an empty apartment without doing anything about it. This was his life's reckoning. Everything he had ever felt, thought, seen and become was in preparation for this moment. He refused to see a life without her. He did not want it. It would be discarded, much like an old garment that no longer fits or serves any purpose.
A clap of thunder rent the air as the rain started to fall, settling into a steady rhythm. The flock of pigeons gathered around the plaza flew distractedly towards the ledges that offered them shelter. People scattered hurriedly, as if afraid that they were made of wax, and would dissolve in the downpour. He remained sitting, motionless. It was almost time.

The rain increased in frequency, as he made futile attempts to protect the rose. Out of desperation, he shoved it into his coat pocket. It would be safe there. He sat in the rain for what seemed to be an interminable period of time. Yet, a steady calm was beginning to descend on him. Perhaps it is the calm that accompanies action in a trying situation, he thought.
"At least I'm doing something about it.", he mused out loud, in a last ditch attempt to boost his flagging faith in himself.

The doors of the building flew open. This was his moment. He got up forcefully, his chair crashing backwards, the noise echoing across the empty plaza like a gunshot. He had gotten the attention of the woman, and strode quickly towards her, dripping wet, his hands and legs trembling. She was smiling at him uncertainly, trying to discern the intention behind his advances. As he walked up to her, he tried his best to effectively articulate the words he had prepared weeks in advance. "There is something I would like you to have. I have wanted to tell you this ever since I saw you. It is my sincerest wish that you would accept my love, for I have loved you since I saw you, and nothing would mean more to me than your acceptance." It had looked nice enough on paper, but had lost much of its intensity in the telling, and came out blunt, awkward. He went down on one knee, and reached into his pocket to give her the rose, as she stared at him, perplexed.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered underneath the awning of the building, watching curiously. He did not fail to notice that none of them were smiling. They were all here to watch him crash and burn, he thought. "But no matter, I have come this far". Self-conscious, and completely absorbed in his thoughts, it was too late when he realized that the force with which he had pulled out the rose had caused the petals to rip away from the stem in a blaze of scarlet, before being hurriedly washed away by the rain. The sound of raucous laughter erupted across the plaza as he stood on bended knee, with a bald rose in his hand. Even the girl was covering her mouth with her hand to suppress peals of laughter. "The shame of it all", he thought, as the laughter reached a shrieking crescendo. "There is only one thing left to do". He stood up, and walked away. The rose fell to the ground, its bright hues dissolving swiftly in the rain.
He turned as the door flew open again, and a handsome young man strode out with an umbrella in his hand.
He was taken aback by how similar the man's features and movements were to his own. The man walked up to the woman, kissed her, murmuring an apology for having left his umbrella inside, and they both walked away together, her arm holding on lightly to his.

The crowd dispersed, to return to their empty lives, aware that the evening's entertainment was over. The downpour slowly ceased. The man walked on with downcast head, as the pigeons once again hopped nimbly in the square around the wet tables and the fallen chair. The flags remained resolutely at half-mast, mute witnesses to rejection.
Everything was once again as it was.

The man woke up screaming in the darkness, drenched in his tears and sweat. He reached out to touch the inert form of his sleeping wife. She stirred.
"What is it, love?"
"Nightmare, I think", he stammered.
His wife sat up and switched on the light so she could see him.
"Darling, it's all right. Look at me. I am here. This is real. You are real." She caressed his face with her hands, as he broke down, sobbing helplessly.
"I had it again. You were with someone else. Everyone laughed, and I went home to put an end to all of it".

"Tell me everything."

He did so, and as the words flowed evenly alongside his tears, the warm sensation of relief that accompanies a confession settled his troubled heart.
She mused for a moment, choosing her words carefully and whispered them into his ears, as they lay enveloped in each other's arms.
"My darling. The man, it wasn't you. You were the one with the umbrella. I have always been yours."

Redemption

The stinging smell of cordite woke him from his coma, or so the doctors would say, when they found his empty bed. The fire alarms, his clarion call, had woken him from what seemed to him a short nap, but what had, in reality been a decade's slumber. Rip Van Winkle, he thought, only, he had awakened to a dsytopian world where things seemed to be perpetually falling apart. But what sort of world had he fallen asleep in? For a decade, his wife had waited for him, showing up everyday at the allowed visiting time, and praying by his side, with an infinite patience, which was even now reflected on her peaceful countenance as she lay blown ten feet away by the full force of the explosion. "This must be Hell", he thought. "It would hurt a lot more if I remembered any of this. Thank God for small mercies."
He looked at her with dumb incomprehension, trying to remember who she was and what she meant to him. His brain was working overtime to protect him from regaining his memory. All he remembered was heavily censored, and only practically useless bits and pieces of information kept jumping out of his subconscious.
He tried to get out of bed, but slumped back, too weak to move, his muscles wasted by the immobility. He could discern hooded figures moving towards him a few feet away, yelling at him. Who were these idiots? What were they doing here? Had they killed this woman? He found himself criticizing the choice of cordite as an explosive material. The idiots. What were they trying to accomplish? A strip of Semtex would have been more than sufficient.
Breathing was suddenly made exhausting by this attempt at movement, and he tried to fight off the mists of sleep that were descending upon his shrinking sight. He inhaled deeply, as the tunnel vision erupted into a white fireball of light, and the cacophony of yells and screams in a strangely familiar tongue gave way to the piercing silence of unconsciousness.

A twig snapped under his feet, as he found himself upright, clawing at the air to shield his eyes from the harsh sunlight. “Delivered again, from darkness into light”, he thought grimly, remembering a half-forgotten prayer from his childhood.
“What if darkness is what I really want?”
A quick glance around him revealed much, but explained nothing. His brain was clever, a protective force that had recently run amuck, and much more of a formidable opponent than his waking self, if that is the term to applied to a conscious persona that is permanently marooned in the cavernous depths of an overactive imagination.
He was in some kind of jungle, cloaked in greenery so vast and bright that it made him squint. The air was blanketed by the fresh smell of the earth after a thunderstorm. He suddenly remembered what childhood was like. He remembered how it felt to run barefoot on the wet earth, with the mud between his toes, chasing after his accomplices, with the smoke of his village lazily wafting over the horizon. He remembered yelling with all the strength he could muster, out of the sheer happiness that belongs to a child who knows no responsibility, and has no concept of the idea of actions and consequences. Those lessons would come later. But for now, he could taste freedom and happiness, for this one brief moment. He celebrated it exultantly. It was a rebirth, the re-birth of an emotion he had thought long since to be dead.
He caught sight of a settlement in the distance, much like his own. Smoke drifted peacefully out of the chimneys, diffracting the rays of the reddening sun. He found himself gravitating towards it,as the voice in his head continued to drone on, monotonously. "All living things must eventually return to the place of their birth,to be taken in again in the arms of an innocent happiness long since lost, a place where all sins are forgiven, and the pain and sorrow of every lesson learned in life is washed clean by the swiftly raging torrents of bliss, of extinction."

He had not staggered three paces when ruins suddenly appeared all around him, rising out of the ground, the trembling earth torn and bruised as large chunks of rock carved out by forgotten artisans started crashing all around. Crumbling towers of granite shot upwards, seeking union with the vastness of space. Were they the pillars of beliefs he once held dear, so eager in their desire to reach upwards, to reach the nothingness above, that they cared nothing about the destruction they caused?
As he looked around uncomprehendingly, his flight instincts were suddenly suppressed by a new understanding that was dawning on him. His mind was playing out his life in metaphors. The village was now ablaze. Children were running, screaming, on fire. Men and women were writhing on the ground in flames, trying to shake themselves of everything they could, to be given a chance to live again. The thick sting of cordite was once again in the air. “Things always start to crumble when happiness rears its head”, the disconnected Voice in his head lectured, as his disoriented stagger turned into a full fledged run in the direction of the town. Out of all this destruction, came discovery, the nauseating discovery that he was somehow responsible for all of this. He was responsible for the lives of those children. He was responsible for why there was a hideously disfigured body in the town square. As he moved closer, he started to recognize details about the corpse. It had once been known to him. It had once been a living, breathing, talking, moving mass, that had much to say about the state of the world, and what should be done to improve the lot of the people that it considered allied to the Cause. He found himself in tears at the sight, conscious of the fact that it had happened once before, yet, there was no memory of tears that time. “Why now? What is happening to me?”. He looked at the bodies of the children that were innocent casualties of his personal war. In each of those little bodies, lay his happiness, a happiness he had worked hard to build, as he remembered slowly, what he meant to these people, and what he had ended up becoming. A torn red vest lying next to the corpse caught his eye. "Little details,colors and smells form the patchwork quilt of our memories", the Voice said. Out of this shredded and stained fabric, a myriad details were now unraveling, too swiftly for his dull mind to process. The sudden onslaught of memory pulled him to his knees, as shots rang out. Uniformed men appeared, firing indiscriminately at everyone and everything. Those in flames were consigned to the merciful hail of bullets that quickly cut short all suffering. The soldiers seemed to be moving in his direction. They moved slowly, unsure of their surroundings, yelling at each other in strange tongues, foreigners. But this was home to him. He felt he knew the land. He belonged here. He felt a connection to it, he had a stake in its prosperity, a stake these destructive strangers did not have. They were looking for him. They had destroyed everything trying to find him. "Infidels", the voice informed him. His brain was now fighting a losing battle with his memory as the torrent of forgotten memories advanced, bursting with their new-found potency, in much the same way as he was losing the battle against the Infidels with guns. He screamed, the impotent scream of a crippled leader who is face to face with the inevitability of a defeat he had long seen coming. The more discriminating marksmen in the uniformed lot took aim, a burst of fire in his direction, and all was silence once more.

He woke up screaming in a tongue he did not know. A shocked old woman sat in front of him, the jar of water in her hand knocked to the ground by his ferocious return to consciousness. Discarded explosives lay everywhere. Amidst the metallic clatter of the falling jar, he tried to come to grips with his identity. It could not be true. He felt like he had woken up from a slumber, and that everything bad was a dream, and it was his redeeming qualities that constituted reality. "It could not be so", he told himself. One does not do these things, especially a person who has devoted his whole life to the betterment of younger, more innocent souls, so that the innocence he lost in the holocaust of his youth, could be preserved in these children. He had been a teacher before he had been overtaken by the madness. “What have I become? What have I done?”
“You have done God's will, Brother”, a voice said from outside. A tall, bearded man walked in. Even though he had not seen his reflection in at least 10 years, he was struck by the man's familiarity, the resemblance to himself. It was almost as if this figure were an external projection of his own self. He did not know who his parents were, but he knew now that his mother had given birth to twins.
The man embraced him. “Your wife is dead, we did not know she would be by your side. We were given to understand that the only people around would be the prisoner detail that was responsible for your safety during your internment. She took care of you for all the years that we could not, and even though she is not one of us, we pray that the Almighty will make space for her in his heart. The world thinks you are in a coma and will never awaken. We must now continue the fight for the oppressed, and as soon as you are better, we will send you again into the occupied lands. Strike where it hurts, and again, do us proud. Brother, you are indeed back from the abyss. Our parents would be proud of you.”

Pride?, he thought. There was no pride left. What little that was left, had died with her. He became conscious of the realization that while his conscience was asleep, he had been little more than a mass-murderer. A sociopath masquerading behind a professorial visage.

He remembered now, how he had met her. The long evenings spent under the canopy of the huge oak tree in the town square. He remembered the musical sound of her laugh, the idle chatter of the shifty-eyed village urchins who were jealous of him for possessing what they desired. He remembered how easily she submitted to him, how easily they fell in love. The long, seemingly interminable years of their romance flooded his consciousness as the tears freely rolled down his cheeks. In his re-birth, he had lost his soul, the one person who had given him the strength to carry on when the weight of his beliefs became too heavy for him to carry. She had never asked him a question about what he believed in. He wished she had. He wished he could have told her everything, he wished he could have confessed, that he was not just a teacher of science, he was also a maker of bombs, a “merchant of death”, that he was also an ardent fanatic, firmly committed to a Cause he had only the dimmest understanding of. A Cause that had destroyed his life so completely that only shards of the broken mosaic were left for him to gather. He wished he had surrendered, he wished could have given himself up early in the game, and not have had to suffer this crushing loss of everything he held close. His beliefs had destroyed everything. Reaching up towards the sky, they had left a trail of destruction in their wake.
The sunlight glinting off the barrel of his brother's discarded AK-47 brought him back to reality. There was now only one thing left to do.

In a hamlet 3 miles away, locals reported hearing a burst of sustained gunfire. The screams went unheard however, as the leadership of an entire insurgency was annihilated. Witnesses reported hearing a solitary shot an hour later. Flocks of frightened crows flew towards the sunset. The scattered band of leaderless insurgents gave statements to the press, citing the insanity of one of their leaders as a reason for the alleged massacre. The occupying army countered, stating that a double agent had successfully infiltrated and eliminated the leadership. The woman was quietly buried in her hometown by her weeping family, and the world did what it does best. It forgot.