മഞ്ഞുവീണതറിഞ്ഞില്ലാ
വെയിൽ വന്നുപോയതറിഞ്ഞില്ലാ
ഓമനേ നീ വരും
നാളുമെണ്ണിയിരുന്നു ഞാൻ

The sun was a raw wound in the western sky, bleeding orange and violet across the dust-choked horizon. She sat on the porch swing, the wood groaning a lament beneath her, a sound older than the hills. A thousand nights had spun themselves into a single, seamless thread of waiting.

The frost had come and gone, silvering the rusted barbed wire in the mornings, then melting into the thirsty earth by noon. She hadn't marked its passage. The days, a procession of hot wind and stark silence, bled one into the other, unheeded. Her eyes, dry as desert stones, held only the phantom trace of a vanishing shape. A bird, a flicker against the vast, indifferent sky, gone.

A shadow fell across the threshold. Not the lengthening blue of twilight, but a deeper, more substantial thing. She didn’t stir. She'd conjured such shadows a thousand times, seen them dissolve into the harsh light of a new dawn.

Then, the air shifted. A scent, like rain on dry earth after a long drought, or a hidden spring unearthed. Not a dream. Her gaze, slow as the turning of the earth, lifted.

He stood there. Framed by the last, dying light. Not a ghost. Not a memory. The dust of the road clinging to him, a testament to miles walked, a journey completed. He was simply there.

A tremor ran through her, a seismic event in the quiet landscape of her soul. The vast, empty space within her, scoured clean by absence, began to fill. A wind, unseen, whispered through the sparse, parched leaves of her inner world. A soundless music, old as creation, bloomed in the hollows of her bones. A slow, unfolding peace, like a rare, nocturnal flower.

Her journey, all the desolate miles and barren vistas, had led to this. The end of the counting. The cessation of the desolate vigil. Her life, finally, had found its measure. He was the shape of her salvation. The quiet, undeniable truth arrived.

എൻ‌റെ ഓർമയിൽ പൂത്തുനിന്നൊരു
മഞ്ഞ മന്ദാരമേ
എന്നിൽ നിന്നും പറന്നുപോയൊരു
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