The Last Reunion

The huge glass-walled room darkened as the last remains of the sun vanished behind the spectral and desolate mountain ranges. The heavy, gray curtains, still undrawn, flew as the gentle evening breeze sneaked its way into the room from the half-closed windows.The long shelves packed tightly with documents, business contracts, and proposals stood still as ever. The computers on the high desks remained dead with black screens. In the corner of the room and across the mahogany table, a girl in her mid 20s remained gazing into the space in front of her-looking lost and lonely. Her dark flowing hair was neatly maintained, her sharp jaws tensed, her dark eyebrows creased, and her long eyelashes frozen in time. She looked like the statue of a beautiful and melancholic young lady struck in time for eternity.

“Click…” A man entered the room and clicked the switch. The room brightened and the edges of the materials became contrastingly sharp to her eyes. The man drew the curtains closed and the sudden essence of reality hit her hard. The notifications on her Ipad rang like thousand drum beats and her smartphone buzzed.

“Ms. Tshoyang, you have a call,” said her secretary who had entered the room shortly.

“Is it the investors again?” asked Tshoyang monotonously.

The slightest thought of the investors frightened her. The income of the company was getting drained and the investors kept demanding for more shares.

“No..it is your….friend,” the secretary informed with disbelieving eyes.

Tshoyang’s eyes suddenly came alive and she rushed to pick up the call. She has lost her friends ever since she has started her million dollar company. She has become rich, richer and the richest among many yet she never found a limit to her desires. In pursuit of money, she had lost all her friends and she had remained lonely with no one to accompany her through some of the darkest hours.

“Hello, we will be holding a reunion party at our previous school tomorrow. If you want to join us, you are invited,” Pelden, her best childhood friend-who became more like a stranger now-informed with a harsh tone and cut the phone abruptly without any proper greetings and before Tshoyang could say anything.

Tshoyang almost declined the not so happy invitation that she received from Pelden but all she wanted at that particular moment was to peel off her present self and become the youthful child that she once was. She might be despised by others, nevertheless, she just wanted to face reality like she did many times before.

***

“Hi Tshoyang! What's up? What took you so long, everyone has been waiting for you over here,” Wangyal, her childhood friend said with a heart warming smile. Tshoyang felt warmth spread all over her body and she felt an unusual uneasiness-but this time she felt a mixture of happy and good uneasiness. She couldn’t easily digest the fact that anyone would be happy to see her or anyone would even want her to join the party. Maybe, it was all an illusion created by her unstable mind, she thought. 

“I do not want to join the party Wangyel. I just want to revisit all the memories that I weaved at this place,” said Tshoyang, rather sadly.

Tshoyang was glad Wangyel agreed without any argument.

As they silently trod the footpath leading farther into the labyrinth of the huge campus, Tshoyang could faintly  hear the music blasting and laughters encircling the place with liveliness-a distant feeling which she lost a long time ago.

Wangyel led Tshoyang to the huge football field where snow used to rise up to ankle length during winter and children used to throw snowballs at each other. 

It was the winter of 2016. Tshoyang was experiencing snowfall for the first time as she was from lower regions of Bhutan. The white layers of cover shrouding the earth in purity simply fascinated Tshoyang and she couldn’t resist herself from making a snowman despite the chill biting her fingers. Her four friends and she had completed making their snowman just when the branches of the pine tree snapped and fell. 

“Cre-crea-creak!” and they all remained frozen to the ground as the branch kept falling right above Tshoyang’s head. Time slowed. It actually seemed like the perfect time for the hero to save the heroine in a movie; only the fact was it wasn’t a movie and Tshoyang was thrown to the ground and the white floor was soon painted with red paint that didn’t seem to stop.

“Tshoyang, are you okay?” Wangyel was asking with concerned eyes, pulling her back to present.

“Do you remember sending paper boats down this stream while we were young?” he inquired with dreamy eyes that still held the liveliness that he had while he was a teenage boy. 

“Yes, vividly,” Tshoyang said.

They used to put folded pieces of paper containing letters to Those-On-The-Other-Side(that's what they called) in the paper boat and run it down the stream. Disappointingly, the paper boat would drown soon after. Those memories hit Tshoyang with a pang of nostalgia and she yearned to return to those good old days.

They walked on the old, stone footpath leading towards the huge classroom buildings, where they hurled crumpled papers at each other when the teacher was absent, chased each other because some people teased some way too much, and dozed off in Geography lessons right after heavy lunch. The memories played and replayed sharply in Tshoyang’s mind and she just wanted to feel those feelings once more in her life. She wanted to fit somewhere in the puzzle.

They visited the grand library where thousands of books still lay untouched ‘cause there are simply way more books than anyone can find time to read. The smell of books wafted through the air and it made Tshoyang miss the old days of serenity even more than before. The keyboards are still there on the desks at the four sides of the room, unchanged as before. It was ironic how everything about the place seemed mostly unchanged while the children, who were innocent of the world once, evolved drastically over the past 15 years.

“Life is unexpected, isn’t it?” Asked Wangyel as they were walking out of the library and ascending the stairs. 

Tshoyang tried to understand what he really meant. 

“Ye--”

Tshoyang was cut short by a strongly built young man sprinting towards them; she could smell something was not right at all.

“Wangyel!...What are you doing alone here? We have been looking for you all over the place….I am so glad you are fine. We thought something happened to you as well.” Sangay finished the sentence between fast breaths. Sangay was a high school mate from eastern part of Bhutan, whom Tshoyang heard was leading an important agriculture project recently. 

“What do you mean Sangay? I don’t understand,” said Wangyel with both suspicion and growing anxiousness. 

“Wangyel...Tshoyang is dead in a car accident along the highway! This might have happened while she was trying to get here,” said Sangay.

Wangyel went silent for what seemed to Tshoyang like forever.

“I am not dead! I know no one over here likes me for…” Tshoyang tried to justify but Sangay wasn’t at all listening to Tshoyang. He was trying to explain the situation to Wangyel whose eyes had gone teary and whose breath was getting harder.

“Stop this nonsense Sangay! What is wrong with you? Tshoyang is right here with us and how could you even imagine blurting out such ungrateful words!” Wangyel shouted with rage clear in his tone and expression.

This statement made Sangay a bit uneasy and his eyes darted here and there, most probably trying to find out who Wangyel was seeing or talking about. He started chanting mantras soon afterwards.

Just then, other friends-Pelden, Sonam, Maya, Jigme, Wangchen and all the school mates came. Some were in tears, some were in solemn state and some were already planning about what to do with the corpse.

“Should I just run away? Should I escape this reality which seemed strange and harder to bear than the most that I have experienced before?”  Tshoyang felt like running away and hiding somewhere, where no one could see her but she felt it was of little use. If she was really dead then why hide for she was already hidden from the light of existence. But she questioned herself time and again. “Am I really dead?” “What is actually happening?” She couldn’t believe anything and she wished it was all a bad dream that she was dreaming; she had a bad life and she was going through the darkest of times but she had never wanted to be dead. She wanted to live.

She wanted to live the most right then.

“I wish I had been a little more polite last time when I called her. I wish I had asked her how she was doing at least,” cried Pelden and everyone hugged her to comfort her. Tears welled in Tshoyang’s eyes and she wished she had spent a little more time with her friends as well.

Now she can’t do anything. She is just a vanishing light that would soon be erased from everyone’s memories and no one would ever remember her.