"How are you feeling miss Manishaa?"...........
I looked up to see a young, beautiful, smiling lady in sky blue typical nurse's uniform standing beside me.
"Umm....better",i whispered.
I was lying in a bed (bed covered with blue bed sheets), my head resting on a soft pillow(that felt the softest pillow ever). The room was probably 320 square feet having spotlessly white-colored walls.
On my left was a table (flower vase stayed calmly on the table), beside the table was a huge grey lounge(so huge that three like me could easily sleep).
"How am I supposed to be here?....err...what happened to me?....and who brought me here?......since how long I'm here?..."I asked politely to the nurse and tried to be as calm as possible.
My questions followed one after another like the semester exams not giving them time to pause(till then I was aware of being in a hospital bed).....
"Miss Manisha, Please take this medicine and rest. You can go once the doctor comes," she said in a soft pampering voice and handed me a few tablets and water and went out of the room leaving me full of quests! (how could she not answer me, man!)
I had to obey her as she was a nurse reflecting the love of a mother. In the foreign land, we rarely find such care and nourishment(but I would rather make a nurse friend for the motherly love than to lie on a hospital bed like a dead body).
I turned right and then left trying to fall asleep in order to get rid of every question that was dancing in my head. On the table in the corner of the room, I saw a flower vase with a few daisies and tulips mixed with few artificial floras.
The only things that could make me really happy in any condition were dogs and flowers. I saw the second one, fortunately. So that was finally a joyous moment for me as long as I remembered being there.
Then suddenly I started feeling dizzy followed by a blur vision. I thought it was the medicine that I had just taken. I closed my eyes ....but still the blur images of some kind of celebration kept on coming. I opened my eyes in frustration and saw a DARK RED flower in between yellows and greens. The images reflected more vividly like that of a 'negative' filter of my beauty cam. I could see myself swimming like a pro swimmer(i never knew to swim), and then some kind of celebration where an old man was opening a bottle of champagne. There the whole atmosphere was full of joy. I tried to search for myself in that crowd but could not find it. The three moments kept on recurring one after the other as if it was programmed with no end loop condition. I clenched my teeth as the electric pulses on my head started giving me shocks (the pain was like that of an electric shock) flowing from my head to toe. Being unable to resist, I screamed with every energy that I had, the frequency of my voice almost cracking the glass door.
The nurse rushed inside the room with a doctor. They quickly injected some liquid inside me. I used to be on the peak of nervousness whenever I saw an injection but this time it did not even appear scary. The injection seemed more like a friend, piercing me to heal me(sometimes real friends become our pain to save us from some greater pain).
I could not speak a word after that. I stared at the white ceiling without blinking (without even seeing the ceiling). I felt comfortably numb. The white ceiling had a red mark, a mark of the same red flower that was on the vase.No yellow not green but RED. I could not get a hint of what the hell was going on with red that I was unable to resist it's the view. Maybe I was suffering from erythrophobia (fear of red color) Or maybe there was a story hidden behind the red flower. The second one seemed stronger in this war zone of my thoughts.
While battling between the maybe and maybe not, a drop of tear fell from my right eye to intervene in the war (like that of a referee in the WWE). I closed my eyes helping the tear escape fully from the corner of my eye(with a pinch of hope of escaping the inexpressible torture along with tears).
The pitch-black darkness behind my closed eyes and me, they looked the same.
"Ma" meant me and "Nishaa" meant a night in Nepali. So that combined to let anyone imagine a dark night (within dark me). Yet in that darkness, the flower REDDENED even more gloriously.
picture source:pixabay.com