Fall of oblivious hearts

Upon the doctor’s advice, Henry starts to paint so that he can remember the little as well as the massive elements that make up his life. His paintings are monotonous interiors of the hospital where he is admitted, until spring comes.

Through his window, he gets the inspiration from a pink four-clover tree. Every day, as he paints, he is mesmerized by the beautiful tree. Soon, he notices a girl who would often come and sit under the tree. Along with a diary that she always carries, there is a melancholy that she carries on her face. She is a pleasant distraction who has now become a part of Henry’s canvas. However unpredictable his amnesia may be, it does not stop him from giving a few strokes of paints every day, even as he struggles with oblivion with every passing day. But little does he know that this new routine is the harbinger of his memory’s revival.

The strawberry-print dress that she wears gushes in him the memory of his grandma who visited him with strawberries the other day. On another day, as it starts raining, a stranger walks past the girl and seeing that she didn’t have an umbrella, offers to share his’. That evening passed by slower than it ought to; the new morning had surprises for him. Henry’s childhood friend came by to pay him a visit. As expected, Henry could not remember him; but as soon as his eyes fell on the umbrella that he was carrying, he got flashbacks of the rainy day. The guy standing before him is the one who is in the painted canvas of the other day!

Time flew, seasons changed. The doctor and his family appreciated the steady improvement in him. One fateful day, as he held his brush and looked out the window to an autumn morning, he could feel the void on his canvas and in his heart. He started flipping back through his past paintings and realizing the reason behind this emptiness, he immediately rushed to the window only to find that the beauty of the tree was gone, so was the girl. But there was her diary still. He could not let this moment pass by. Before his memory betrayed him, he had made his way out of the hospital.

Now, approaching the tree, he reached for the diary and started reading it, for his curiosity had given way to impatience. The revelation that the pages gave left him in utter awe and perplexity. In one of her diary entries, she mentioned how when she was walking past that hospital one winter night, she saw him painting. The sight of that light in the darkness engendered a spark of hope in her that one could find warmth even in the coldest of nights and in the most alien of strangers. Now, this fly-on-the-wall had her own world to herself with the avalanche of arrhythmia under which she lived. But this dimension of isolation was fine as long as she had the panorama of Henry painting. However, she noticed that Henry had stopped painting during late nights once winter ended and so she stopped coming, until the tree blossomed. While Henry was still immersed in the diary, he suddenly remembered how the girl would often look up and stare at him. But all she ever saw were tinted windows through her rose-colored glasses. So, their eyes never met, nor did their fantasies.

As the diary’s pages were getting lesser, his heart started beating louder as he read the last entry:

"Somewhere deep inside the chambers

There, I feel my petals

As they slowly wither..."

There was a long stroke at the end which seemed as if she collapsed after writing this. With trembling hands, Henry closed the diary and as he did that, the last petal of the flower fell on it.