Wandering around the Vacancies of the week page Khadija, physically present but absent, lost in her thoughts while her eye balls drilling the newspaper for a suitable spot where she could fit in to meet her personal and social responsibility and contribute to the country’s economy. Wrapping her tousled hair strand around her bulbous index finger tirelessly like a clock’s time hand. Peeling off the upper layers of her pursed lips from her clenched incisors, Khadija was in the resting posting slightly nodding her neck deep in the complexed, unarranged sections that were tough to understand but more crucial to its readers.
“Bring me tomatoes and soy sauce from the refrigerator”, a clustery voice, exhausted of seventy five years of roughness calls Khadija for her assistance from the kitchen.
“Briiingiiing” Khadija replied with a deep exhalation from her lips which her now open enough to shudder from the air she breathed out. Placing her chubby hands first on the floor, she unfolded her right leg, rested her other arm on the black leathery sofa which she was leaning against and then stood up triumphantly. She marches towards her refrigerator on her potato feet opens her refrigerator which was all sorted and nearly had anything inside it except for the veggie’s drawer at the bottom, shady enough to only echo the gloomy grey reflection. She grabs both the items and walk towards her mother who was preparing the dinner. Placing them on the white lace clothed dining table beside the leftover half bowl of rice which will be their dinner for tonight.
Half way turned Khadija stops and turned around to look back on her mother’s revelation that there is no more than half of a table spoon soy sauce left in the bottle and she will have to get a new one. Despite Khadija’s insistence of adding some water and shake it to make it sufficient enough for today’s need, her mother forced her to bring a new one from the forty-five footsteps away Ahmed convenience store at the end of the street.
Screeching her crocs with her chin hanging to the floor, following the pavement markings, Khadija shove off for the accomplishment of the task her mother had assigned her. Kicking off the fine dust underneath, she was leaving every burden off her shoulder with her each step. The prismatic bright shadow moving alongside accompanying her neither a step ahead nor back, maintaining the pace as hers.
With her hands sneaked in the pocket, and a stroller robed around her head in the rusty gold sun beam emitting from her back, her bumpy steps turned restful as if the gravity was holding her in its lap. The mildly chilled breeze caressing her nose turning it into like strawberry in ice cold greek-yogurt. She was now loving her own company, which was rear. Rear because it was for the first time this month she departed from her cottony soft, white warm nest.
Yes she used to spend her days and days like this. She had a few friends earlier but now both of them moved away from this area. One got married and the other went to study abroad for higher education. They were her childhood friends, and were always there for her, but may be Khadija was not for herself. The walk was getting long and long and longer, that she passed by her task without a moment of recalling her purpose. Khadija moves forward steadily, maybe she had something on her mind. Her feet were now trekking towards her destination pushing back her shackles off with each movement.
Springing agitatedly for at least sixty cycles of minute hand, sucking in all the air around her, Khadija with her eyes sealed stood motionless on her noodle legs with her chest hammering, her hands quivering, her huffing lungs begging for oxygen. She could not move an inch.
Now she was standing at the sloping barrier between her and her love, at the waterfront of the river that swallowed her life. Her throat filling up, chocking her like a solid knob that she has been trying to gulp down for a decade. She was screaming for help out loud yet nobody could hearken. Her eyes were bursting with remorse for which she was never responsible, her bases trembling of howl that only she could apprehend and an apology that only she could decipher.
Only if she could run the pointers of the clock back, only if she could reverse the pages of time's calendar, unspooling the past with a wistful breath, she might yet grasp the fleeting moments once lost. But now, all she could do was immortalize her love in the boundless expanse of eternity.