The Mixtape

He felt an inexplicable fury inside of him as he switched his phone off abruptly. His friend at the other side of the call might have found it strange, but at that point of time he didn’t care. He was too mad. He couldn’t believe she would be this way, after all these years.

He sat down by the window of his studio apartment. He looked out from his third floor to see the downtown traffic. It was peak rush hour and the traffic seemed manic as always. He was however more aware of the noise that he felt from within…that of seething rage and intense anger. “How could she, how could she” was all he asked himself.

They had been separated for over a year now. 9 years of marriage and one 8-yeard old daughter were out of his life forever now. They had been drifting apart for a while but the last couple of years were terrible. He seemed to have an incredible lack of patience when it came to understanding her. Or at least that’s what she said every time they would have a meltdown. He knew secretly that little things about her irritated him more than usual and his stock of patience was rapidly diminishing. He never admitted it to her, but somewhere deep inside he knew she was right. Why he felt that way he never understood.

They gave it one last serious attempt for the final year or so. They went to marriage counselors, therapists and even a few close friends to discuss their relationship and try and better it. It was a lost cause but they both tried. However finally when it snapped, the inevitable happened. A lot of angry, bitter outbursts in public, a dirty custody battle for their daughter, a of lot of dirty linen washed in public. Their split was ugly to say the least.

His life spiraled down after their breakup. He left his job and took to writing from home. Soon he shifted from their cosy, suburbean house to a small studio, compact enough to store his books and records. He had a single bed which took up the rest of the apartment. He did the occasional freelance to make ends meet. Mainly for his drinking, which had increased. Apart from that he had no expenses to talk of. He hardly went out, met people or spent on other things. Six months earlier he heard about her second marriage. It was to the same fellow in her office. He remembered many a fight they had about him. She always insisted he was a friend and nothing more. He doubted his intentions from the start. He almost felt vindicated when he heard of their marriage. “I was right after all,” he thought bitterly. He also thought of his daughter. “I wonder how she will take to him,” he wondered out aloud at times. “A stranger, a new man could never replace her real father”.

Some evenings he missed them both a lot. He wished he could go back in time, make amends and have them back in his life. His drinking increased considerably those nights. He would pull up a mix-tape, they had once made together. “The soundtrack of our lives,” they would say, every time they sat together and heard the tape. He would remember the times when the two of them sat and heard it together. In the later years their daughter sat in between them while they heard it. Life had seemed picture perfect then. Now when he heard the tape it would make him sadder than before. Lonelier than ever.

He got up from his bed and walked out of his apartment. He was carrying the mix-tape in his pocket. He wanted to fling it on her face and call it quits forever. He had had enough. Memories flooded his mind as he travelled by the metro to reach his old house. “I gave her the house. I might as well give this tape away and end it once and for all.” He thought to himself angrily as the train whizzed past the subway stations. When he got off he walked briskly towards his house. From a distance he could see her husband. He had just driven the car close to the main steps of the house. He felt a wave of anger run through his body as he saw him.

And then something strange happened….

He saw her. Her face looking it was lit up by a million suns. The glow on her face. That smile, that look. He kept looking at her. Mesmerised, as he was nearly 10 years ago. There was a bump on her tummy that was hard to miss. And suddenly from behind he saw their daughter, running towards her mother, carrying a bunch of colourful balloons that she handed over to her. She wrapped her arms around her mother’s tummy, their laughter echoing all over. Her husband rushed up the stairs, not wanting to be left out of the warm hug mother and daughter were sharing. The three of them laughed as they reached the car. Mother and daughter took the backseats as he happily sat in front and drove off.

He kept standing by himself at a distance from his old house, as the dust from the road, blinded his vision for a while. He soon realized it wasn’t the dust alone. His eyes had filled up. He took one long last look at the house and sighed. It would be a long subway journey back to his apartment.

That evening as he reached his apartment, he put the mix-tape in a brown envelope and kept in safely up in the trunk in the loft. “Soundtrack Of Our Lives” was scribbled on top of the envelope. He knew he wouldn’t be opening that trunk for a long time now.

Copyright (c) Pratik Majumdar