That she is dying and has something from a month to a two to go, was spelt out to her in a professional, perhaps slightly compassionate and yet disengaged tone. The verdict had been handed out, clearly and unambiguously. She was further explained how she'd first lose her voice, then her sight, and then, decay, not quite slowly. And yet, as funny as it may sound, this is not but the only verdict she was handed out on the same day. As if she wasn’t yet quite done with! And so, the next two follow: that, she has been "downsized" at her job, and unloved by her lover.
Three verdicts - each unknowing and indifferent to the other two; each, brutal times more due to the other, and yet oblivious; each, each alone, having the power, proved over history, to easily crumble and perish a soul to dust but not before mercilessly tossing it aside into a nothingness safely and surely unknown to one who hasn't walked that road or died those deaths that she was about to, starting that day.
So well, you tell me! What do you do when you’re handed out such a destiny, and you know that they happen, for sure, and all you might do is to accept them and know, tell yourself, in capitals, bold and underlined, that – Very well, girl. This is it!
Know what? Idea!
You… accept.
But then, it must be just as difficult as you let yourself feel it to be, and then it can quite be too immense, too immense to even try to handle. So, then what?
Let go.
Yes, you read me right. Let Go.
Let go!
Let go – really?
Well! When you know what you know - and that you know that may you scream, pray, break, make and do what you may, none of those will have a scratch on what fate has written for you - that, you have but sixty days to live. Then, why not live them? Why not live those remaining days, than die any sooner to what’s so soon already.
Why not let go and live, for once?
Melody Wilder has in her wallet the half-a-dozen credit cards and some sixty days left to herself, at the most.
She lives.
She Lives, At last.
She Lives, At Last, And How!
…and thus, the movie begins!
And thus starts a love affair between Melody - a once beautiful now pale, hoarse in the voice and weak at the knees, dying and yet not sure what it means, girl of perhaps twenty something - and that mystery called Life. An affair, as short as it might be, an affair, nonetheless. An affair that was - howsoever brief - final…
Well, to begin, first. She let’s go, as we had already said. You think, it really isn't perhaps as difficult as it sounds, right? However it seems simple, it does. It seems all too simple as she lets go everything. Not one by one, but at once. Everything. Everything! She gives up everything - from her house to her belongings, to the last piece of cloth that she wore. Just, save for her about half a dozen credit cards.
And then, she acquires a new everything instead.
Shifting into a plush moon-white palatial loft sprawling wide and long on a short-term rent, she glosses through the pages of magazines to pick up the fanciest products in everything - the special menus from restaurants for every meal to the most expensive beds and sofa-sets and chairs, from the majestic clothing lines to the most chosen lamp shades and curtains. She lives off her credit cards that she believes that she wouldn't never have to pay off.She gets everything she can get, she spends on everything she can spend on. She eats her best, she wears her best, she sleeps her best. The furniture-delivery Afro-American guy to the pizza-delivery teenager looking tomboy, she loves and sleeps and wakes to glory. Short-lived as it may be, she doesn't count her days or knows the date on the calendar or the time on her watch anymore.
And, The Guitar!!
On the very first nights that she had made herself this new way of life, she had been having a recurrent dream, a flashback into her own childhood that had been buried down in her recent life - one, of a guitar. A red electric guitar, a sight across the showcase of the shop Melody would often pass by as a child, that one thing that she fancied and even asked for from her parents but tey didn't have enough to give way to such expensive fancies.
She now bought The Guitar too! Oh, and she takes a short beginner's course in playing the electric guitar, too.
She has the money, albeit on her cards, but no time to live any later, and so she lives now. She lives her life behind the doors, never stepping out into the rest of the world. She eats, sleeps, smiles, makes love. And she plays the guitar. She lives - for she has nothing to lose, afterall!
And slowly, from the sickly girl that had first crawled her way to the door when the bell had rung the first day that she came, she transforms. She develops a passion for life, she loves the passage of the days. She transforms into a kind of worriless, sensual, fulfilling and happy living as few have ever lived like.
And then a day comes. She calls the restaurant to order for another lavish meal, casually adding another ten dollars for a tip with a wave of a hand, as she has been doing all these days. It doesn't work! For the first time in this new episode in her life, she gets an incoming call on her phone and it informs her that her card isn't working. She offers to read out another card, and then another, and makes out that she had run out on all her card balances on every card she held, which by the way were her only means left in the world. Exasperated and suspicious of a possibility that she deems impossible, she asks the caller the final questions - what day and month was it on the calendar that day.
She steps out of her closed enclosure for the first time now, to rush to her doctor's chamber. They scan her, they study her. They are as surprised as she was. Not only has she outlived her time that the cancer had stipulated for her, she doesn't have the malignant tumour in her brain anymore! Medical science cannot explain it, and the doctors suggest that it can only be possibly explained with saying that the tumour didn't recognise the body, her body, anymore, and so it left! It is indeed a miracle. They ask her what she had changed in her life. She replies: "Everything!"
Well, we said she had acquired a new everything already a many paragraphs back, didn’t we? But hardly did she, and we, And then, she acquires a new everything instead.
Back into her apartment, she strums her guitar into glory, celebrating her newfound life.
While her scheme didn't work, her life did. And now therefore, back into the big, bad world, she has to have a living; more, she has now to pay off the debts that she had not counted on. She is alive, and she did not count on that - she tells the owner of the loft, leaving him as confused as one would be.
She now starts selling off her possessions one by one. She carries the chairs and the lampshades and linens to the shop, being paid off a meagre sum in return for all the fancy, expensive, recently bought items. The last thing, she carries her red guitar to the shop, and at the very last moment, decides that she cannot get herself to sell that thing off. Shhe zips up the cover and carries herself and the guitar into a nearby park, hungry and without means. She sits herself under a tree and places a bowl in the front, and plays the guitar; she begs.
But, against all odds that may be, once you have your life, you cannot be compaining. She has got back her life, and now she will need to make a living. But then, as long as there's life, everything else falls into place, doesn't it?
It's only a matter of a while that she is then spotted by a team of for men with guitars on their back, who comes and stands in front on her and hears her play. And next? Well, she's on stage strumming along with the musical band - into her life, into glory!
Such is life! And such is a time, perhaps, that we realise what life means. It takes us to be pushed to the wall to see what we ignore all the time. The sheer miracle of the plain fact - the fact, that we are living!
It perhaps takes an end to know how to start - she starts to live, and how!
And just as I started to think that howsoever bright, this is only but a fantasy, I come across this story:
There’s hope! Oh, there’s hope, or so it seems!
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