Of The Delusional Human Heart

She pulled out a few letters from the old, brown leather bag that she clutched weakly in her hands. The little young man, who had helped her get on the ride, had asked her to leave behind her bag in the waiting area, but she had smiled at him and told them that she needed to keep it with her.

She ran her hands over the skin of the letters, running the tips of her fingers along the crumpled edges of the hundred letters she had written to her husband over the year. There were blotches of ink on them and some letters had been smudged. Yet, she could read them like the back of her palm. She knew the contents of the letters, in her heart. Subsequently all, she was the one who had penned them with extreme care, debating her husband’s replied with every course she wrote with the drying ink.

How she had been so madly in love with him to write the letters and expecting him to reply back when he was serving the country at war! Oh, how she had been so madly in love with him that she kept on sending the letters without an address on them! Oh, just how madly in love she had been to write “To, My Husband” on top of the pale, yellow envelope and throw it into the mail box and require it to be handed over! Indeed, she had been so crazily in love with him that his loss was breaking her apart every second the ride moved up a short bit in the breeze.

The old mailman, with his several thousand wrinkles intricately drawn upon his face and a bald, shiny head, had seen those letters and collected them over the years. More often than not, he would have discarded them as they never carried an address, but something close to the letters reached him. Maybe it was the illegible writing of the solitary woman who sat near the window, waiting for her husband. He had lost his wife and he knew the grief. So he kept them in a corner of the post office.

And one day, he had seen the old lady make her way to the post box again. He had run after her and inquired her husband’s name. And he had written it on all her letters and sent them with the army men who occasionally came to their town.

Only, the letters had returned back to him as no one had claimed them. With a painful heart, he had given them back to the old woman.

The trumpets and several noises filled the town. The men were coming back from war. Instinctively, she looked down from there, thinking that her husband would be there, although she knew that he would never return.

Yet, a part of her held on to the hope. A part of her believed that the news reporter had made some mistake while reading out the names of the soldiers who had died on the field.

How could her husband be one of them?!

He had always been so strong and so bold!

He had survived several bullet wounds!

He couldn’t have died!

Oh, the pitiful, human heart!

With a painful smile etched on her face, she returned to those letters and read them aloud as the ride soared up. She read those letters to her husband who was probably somewhere, listening to her…

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