Stars | completed

26. Consequences

Only if-- my thoughts were cutting out.

"Manik!" I heard a familiar voice. I tried keeping my eyes open, but the lack of oxygen was getting to me.

I felt cotton hands wrapping around my waste, pulling my small body closer. "Manik!" The same voice again. Mom?

What was she doing here?

Wasn't I in the middle of the ocean? Wasn't I dying?

"Hold tight, son," she said, "Dad's bringing help. He'll save you. You'll be okay."

Her arms held me tighter, but I stopped struggling. I could feel the water in my mouth and my nostrils and everywhere, giving up in my mother's arms.

I didn't know how she got there or how she found me. Perhaps, a mother's love, as they say.

I just remember the deafening sound of water in my ears and hurting body for days as darkness surrounded me physically.

When I woke up next, it was on a hospital bed, three days later. Dad was next to me, trying not to cry, but the moment his eyes met mine, he burst out crying.

Mum was gone.

She died saving me.

Dad could only evacuate me-- alive. Well, he evacuated Mom too, but her dead body, one day after I was found.

My world shifted that day. My mom used to often speak to me about fairies and fairy tales, skies and rainbows, clouds and rains, the darkness and the stars, and everything in between it. She was magical, her very presence. She was a dreamer, an achiever, a fairytale believer, mystified by the shadows of the night, and slightly over enchanted by the stars that adorn them.

The stars.

She loved them so much, that that's what she became. A star.

That's what I believed in, which is why whenever I felt that the shadows of my past were haunting me again, I sat in front of the sea waves under the night sky, feeling her presence. She lost herself in a wild ocean that day, and it still hurts me to think how she would've died. She would struggled to remain alive like I was doing, trying and trying until she gave up, water entering into every cell and vein of her body as her body sunk, and she would have left the world, hoping Dad would find and save me atleast.

But she struggled to be alive. She struggled and she struggled until she couldn't do it anymore and giving up was the only option left.

That's when I realised the real meaning of Stars. Stars and not celebrities or famous people or anyone that the society idolised. A star is any person who accepts the darkness within them and chooses to shine despite the pain and chooses to live, trusts that one reason to live despite a hundred reasons to die that life might throw at them.

Nandini was my star.

After my mother, the only person I could ever actually call a star was her.

She was my star. But I was oblivious to something.

I was oblivious to the fact that Stars burn too. And when they do, they burn slowly, painfully, consuming everything around them; even the smallest matter in vacuum is eaten away by them, and all of a sudden, just like that, they're gone. They're gone leaving behind no trace of them, just nothingness, like that star never existed in the first place.