The one fading away

He'd slipped on his white pajamas and the dull brown t-shirt he'd asked his daughter to send from home. He was in the hospital bathroom with off white dirty tiles. The ceiling a bit too high. He walked out of the bathroom to a small private room assigned to the woman he'd fallen in love with forty years back. She was asleep. With wires attached to what looked like almost every part of her body, she didn't cease to look beautiful to him. Even in the last stage of this life consuming disease, she was still that girl who had his heart. He made his bed. It was a small mattress worn out with time. He laid down next to her. His thoughts had taken a positive turn today. Even though the plump doctor with an inhumanly long nose had declared her to be a guest of a week or two. I saw her smile today- he thought. Oh, that wonderful, sweet, life changing smile. It took him a long way back to 1982. He was on his way back home, taking the last local that left. Sweating and panting like a dog with the tedious day he'd had. He looked at a girl seated right in front of him. She had two old, rusty books clutched to her chest. In the blue salwar kammez with little flowers embroidered on the kameez. Her eyebrows so delicately threaded to perfection. She had dark brown eyes which looked bengali- given they were round and so mesmerizing. He thought he'd keep staring at her till the train comes to a halt. She instantly felt like the one he would be with. Even if the idea of love at first sight sounded absurd, he was concrete sure that he would this woman to wake up next to him every morning. Even after all these years, lying next to her on her deathbed he could not be practical. No matter how much people explained him. No matter how many of them said that it is going to happen. Oh how he could not imagine that round eyed girl, shy, with her books in her hands fading away from him. That woman he'd dreamt of taunting and teasing when she wouldn't be able to walk with old age. That woman who he'd visioned holding hands with while walking to the temple in chilly mornings. No, it just couldn't be her on this wired bed next to him. She couldn't leave him and go anywhere, not even to god. He needed her more! Yet, wiping his eyes, he looked at her majestically beautiful face one more time and drifted off to sleep.