river of sleep.

(author's note:this maybe disturbing to some readers.and no,i am not feeling suicidal.)

she stared at the body on her autopsy table.and felt a deep sadness shift in her.the dead girl was young,hardly out of her teenage years.the cold,dull light of the tubelight in the morgue made her look younger and vulnerable.the case was of suicide.and she was the doctor assigned to perform the autopsy.

she hated such cases.in her life as a doctor,she had come across many fighters,survivors,people who valued life too much to kill themselves.though she tried not to be judgemental,she couldnot help but think of the total waste of suicide.what made people give up?
sighing she started her job.

after her long day,she picked up a cup of coffee from the vending machine and made way to the doctor's lounge and settled herself in a chair.she hated coffee,but she welcomed the scalding feel of the thick brew on her tongue.her mind couldnot shake off those beautiful eyes of the young girl.why?she felt depressed.





she stared at the gaping hole,which was once her wrist.
delicate,that is what people referred to her wrist as.
now that delicate wrist was an open wound from which a crimson tide of her lifeline flowed away,seeped away,slowly extinguishing her life force.

she was lying down,face up,staring at the ceiling,outside the bright skies seemed brighter to her,she felt no pain,only an awareness of the skin torn at her wrist,her radial artery severed by her with the help of her favourite knife from her collection.she was aware of a singe,of something slowly itching.she knew it was her skin,on both sides of the slash.

a ghost of a smile came and disappeared on her lips,if someone had told her a year back that she would contemplate suicide,she would have laughed at their faces,she loved her life too much to even think about brutally slaughtering it,but then here she was,not just contemplating but also having committed it.
she did not want to degenerate,become a burden on people she loved,slowly see the laughter from their eyes seep away and be replaced by an irreplaceable sadness.

she watched her blood stain the carpet,a stain which would never be removed completely,was her life too like this stain of her blood,staining and marking people's lives?

she felt herself going slack,her vision blurred,she could see vague shapes in the sky.her father,holding balloons for her,throwing her up in the skies,making her believe,she could fly.the balloons flew away into the skies,she started tumbling downwards,towards earth.

strong hands caught her,her mother. a vision of her mother washing her hands in the kitchen sink filled her eyes,water and hands.both were strong,adaptable and overwhelming when need be.

her brother,her silent supporter,the one who had taught her that people can speak without words,if they could read each other's eyes.

her love,who would shift the very foundation of this world for her.
was she fair on them?would they ever forgive her for this?would they ever forgive themselves?
would they always silently harbour a guilt in their souls for what she was doing?

she could feel her heart beating loudly,her vision narrowed,she was seeing a tunnel and light at its end.she knew it was not the tunnel of salvation at the end of which there was light.it was her cornea shrinking.her heart was beating faster to compensate for the heavy loss of blood,to stop the hemorrhage.being a doctor took away the romance of suicide,she thought wryly.

she felt pain for the first time,she managed to turn her head to watch the laceration on her wrist,blood was everywhere,her lifeline was filtering from the two open lips of her wound like the last rays of the sun just before the world was immersed in darkness.

she loved her life,she did not want the easy way out,of sleeping pills,she wanted to see it flow away,staining everything in its way.

the sun set,the amber river faded from her vision,blessed sleep overcame her.



she awoke with a start and found herself on the chair in the doctor's lounge with coffee spilt all over her wrist.
her pager beeped.

she looked down to find a message from her senior doctor,asking her to be present at the morgue.
shaken,she made her way down to the morgue for the second time on the same day.
as she entered it,her senior said,

"aah,there you are.i know you personally dont like such cases,but i want you to set aside your judgemental mindset and proceed.we dont know what makes people do this to themselves,but that is not our business,you are supposed to confirm the cause of suicide in this case,it is obviously body shutting down due to hypovolemic shock and....."
he droned on.....


she silently stared down at the body,and again felt a deep sadness shift in her.
but this time,the young face with dead eyes staring back at her didnot evoke any feelings of judgments.