Happy Friendship Day

My neighbour often cries herself to sleep. Sometimes she cries during the day too. Loudly. I don’t know how to help her. And sometimes I just wish she would stop. When I hear her wails, I imagine she must be her lying on the floor, drool coming from her mouth as she bangs her fists in frustration at the hard wood floor. I feel her pain. We all have our pains.

But I can’t stop her. Occasionally, I bump into her during the day. She often looks better than she sounds. But her thin lips, pressed together give her away. It is almost as if she wants to hold her mouth together, in case she is unable to contain her wails or say anything inappropriate if she opens her mouth. Once or twice, I tried to smile at her, out of neighbourliness. But she is in a place of her own. As if there is a dark cloud all around her, that keeps her from seeing anything else. I wonder if the cloud torments her, making her cry. 

I feel she is very alone. Drowning in a deep dark sea on a moonless night.

I feel thankful for myself when I think of her. There might not be many people in my life, but at least there is Maya. She is not always there, but she visits regularly. I don’t call her, she comes when she feels like, in the white dress she always wears. To be honest, I like the fact that she can appear anytime, the unpredictability of it all. Sometimes she tells me tales of her adventures. She is a free spirit, Maya. Last week, she was hiking in the mountains, and she described the view from the top. She was left breathless, she says. These days she is practicing for her next dance recital. It will be for a big audience, and she is working very hard for it. She even showed me a bit of her dance. It is a fusion performance.

It is always entertaining to be around beautiful Maya. Though sometimes, we fight. Like today. She asked me to come to her dance performance. She knows I cant come, but she still insists. I don’t know why she does this. When she fights with me, I don’t cry, like my neighbour. I yell. And sometimes I don’t know when the yelling will stop.

Today while I was yelling, I heard the footsteps of the building’s caretaker. Soon she opened my door. I don’t know who does something like this. She brought two other ladies along. They took me by an arm each, while she injected a tranquiliser into me. Soon I was drifting off. I could hear my neighbour’s wailing again, but it was almost coming from a far off place. Even though we had fought, Maya was still there, my head in her lap, as I dozed off. Happy Friendship Day, she said, before disappearing.

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