Dreamless Ink... (A peek into my Grandma's diary)

"My dear Diary"
It whispered,
The first line of the antique
I stumbled upon in a dusty corner,
Its leather cracked like her hands once were.
Just days after her ashes drifted into the wind,
I held her words,
A bridge to an era where she was young,
Where dreams flickered in her eyes.

"Today I learnt how to write,"
She scrawled,
Letters trembling with a child’s thrill,
Each stroke bursting with unpolished joy.
My lips curled into a smile,
picturing her—
A girl with just innocence and wild dreams,
Not of codes or stethoscopes,
But of a tree in her backyard,
Its branches a ladder to the sky.
She wanted to climb,
To live.

The pages, brittle and yellowed,
Wore time’s favorite shade,
Each turn a balm to the ache of her absence.
I hungered to know this girl,
The one who grew into the sweet woman
I called Grandma.
Then, on the fifth page,
A spark:
"I also met a guy today,
my parents told me to be his best friend."
My heart leapt—
A boy, a story,
The first hint of something new.

I turned the page,
Eager and excited,
But found only silence.
Empty.
Not a word followed.
The realization struck like a stone:
All those times I asked,
"Grandma, what was your dream, your goal,
What did you want to become?"
Her answer, always,
"Nothing."  

And now,
In the hollow of that final page,
I understood.
"Nothing" was a life unlived,
A dream left dangling
on the branches of that backyard tree.

~आपबीती (Aapbeeti)