JUNE 10th - JULY 10th
If someone asked me a synonym for attachment, I'd say, "suffering."
My green socks were missing one pair, and I was not so happy about it. After all, it was my favorite pair of socks. And not only mine, but many of my father's socks also went missing. Anyway,
It was a sunny morning when we found it laying on the warm floor of our balcony. It was struggling to move, but could only crawl a little. Where it came from wasn't our primary concern; there hung a black bag high up on the wall of the balcony; we often saw a squirrel going back and forth to it, so the question was "how did it come here on the floor?" But we didn't think much about it. The first thing we did was put some drops of milk on the floor and it licked and then moved backward. It tried to move as if finding a specific place, probably its nest. We deduced that the mother squirrel hadn't been coming for days now. He might be hungry, so maybe that's why it came down, but again, "how?". We decided to give it a name. After Googling, we mutually agreed on Nutsy. We built a home for Nutsy. We took a large shoebox and put neat cotton clothes on the bottom of it. I made two small pillows, similar to the size of a digit of my index finger, out of the same cloth material. We carefully placed it in the box, and as it turned slightly on its back, I realized it was a boy. He crawled to the corner of the box and kept laying there on his stomach, occupying only a small space of the whole area of the box. He looked so delicate that we were afraid that he would break if we touched him. He had little fur on his body, some stripes on his back, a tail without furs, and his eyes were not open yet. Of course, we didn't know how to take care of a baby squirrel. So I googled almost everything about the baby squirrels.
We had to look after Nutsy until he comes about as an adult. Another option was to bestow him to rehab, but we were hoping that his mother would come and take him with her. I even imagined the scene of the precious moment of their reunion. With that, we were so very excited about adding a new member to our family. Taking him in was a great responsibility. After all, it was a little soul. We wanted him to live and reunite with his mother.
I checked up on him. He had covered himself with clothes and was sleeping soundly. It had been 3-4 hours since we found him meaning time to feed him. So I took lukewarm milk and diluted its concentration by adding water, soaked a cotton ball about the size of a chickpea, and put it inside the box. He smelled milk and held the cotton ball in his hands near his chest. He started sucking the cotton ball, and it melted my heart.
And the thought occurred that Nutsy must have siblings. They must be in the nest (the black bag). We needed to check up on them also. Standing on my toes, I grabbed the base of the bag and inhaled a strong odor. It was stinking. I tried to fetch it with the help of my sister. We somehow took it off the nail and put it on the floor, but were not brave enough to open it and take a look inside it. While she and I were giving looks to each other in the hope that either one would do the job, our father came to rescue the situation. He opened the bag and removed a clump of nibbled socks from an adequate distance from the bag, and it was stinking. He put the clump down on the floor and found brown-colored, almost microscopic ticks littered everywhere on the socks. I noticed a small mass with a tail stuck in the clump of socks. It wasn't moving, it was just there and I freaked out seeing it. My mother came hurriedly, hearing me scream, and my father was also taken aback. My sister did not dare come near it, let alone witness the scene. My father was taking out the wooden TLM kept in the bag one by one, and we saw that the squirrels had gnawed through them also. He then inverted the bag empty and another small breathless mass fell out of it, and again I freaked out. Thousands of brown ants were seen roaming all around the floor.
For some reason, I never liked ants, and seeing them like this made me dislike them even more. A floor so neat a while ago looked like a dumpster. My father and mother's only concern was the ruined TLM and socks (respectively). Although I was proud of my green sock, for it was a constituent, a unit of someone's home, and I was no longer sad about losing it. The home now reeked of Nutsy's siblings' deceased bodies. The father uncomfortably collected all the socks and both the masses, along with the socks, to put them back in the bag, and decided to dump the whole bag. And my mother washed the floor.
So Nutsy was a survivor. He made it while his siblings could not. This made us want him to live more, to survive up until the very end.
We shifted Nutsy to my room. We put his box in a dark corner near my bed. To keep Nutsy warm, we made a small bag of cotton cloth and filled it with rice. We needed to heat the bag again and again.
During that time of lockdown when I was in the "life is meaningless" phase, Nutsy became the reason to keep me going on. He was so adorable that I could spend hours just watching him sleep, sucking on the cotton ball for milk. Caressing him was like having the most beautiful feeling in the world. He was softer than that cotton ball, smaller than my small palm, and his palms were smaller than my fingertip. I always had a thing for small things, and this small thing of being alive was the cherry on top. And how he would slide under the warm rice bag to get its warmth was adorable, and every time I looked at him, my heart filled with the sweetness of love, and I couldn't help saying, "He's so lovely." every single time. Although, he looked funny pressurizing himself to pass his motion because he was constipated. He would apply all the force he had got on both of his hind limbs and walk here and there in the box. I remember how I told all my pending assignments and files to go rest somewhere; I'll not be dealing with you any time soon now, and the times when I needed to hush my parents for being too loud near him. I felt a sense of love like that of a parent while taking care of him, and I was proud and excited to see him walking and climbing the wall of the box, just like our parents might have when we learned to put our feet on the floor for the first time. It was as if I was living my golden time with that little soul. We were desperately waiting for Nutsy to turn six days old and open his eyes. My sister and I even had a little dispute over who Nutsy sees first when he opens his eyes.
It’s been two years since that incident, but remembering him still makes me feel dejected. Because he, who got me feeling all the beautiful emotions I possibly could never have felt, never opened his eyes, and those eyes were shut forever on the day when we most anticipated him opening his eyes for the first time since his birth. It was a painful afternoon when my sister came and announced that there was something wrong with Nutsy. He's laying in the middle of the box on his back. It was uncanny because he always slept in the corner covered in clothes. I gathered the courage to go inside the room. I drew in the same smell similar to when I was trying to reach the black bag. I looked inside the box. He looked stiff, his mouth wide open. That sore sight of him exhaling his last breath, probably his soul leaving his body, still creates turmoil inside me, Still gets my eyes teary, Still wrenches my guts, Still stings my heart to an extent that even now my hands are trembling while typing this countenance. We were all in disbelief. Just the day before, he was roaming across the room looking so lively, but now? I had two long streams of tears streaming down my cheeks. We kept staring at him hoping he would start moving again, but he never did. After a long wait, we finally decided to put him to rest. We took him down to the park. My father dug a small grave and buried him along with our longing for him to reunite with his mother. We got the answer to that "how?" from the beginning. He probably fell from his nest and got injured, giving him eternal rest from the suffering of the injuries eventually.
So this was my unconventional love story.
It took only two days for me to fall in love.
And then, a moment to leave me all empty of my emotions.
Within a week, I learned and felt what love is like.
Within a week, I learned and felt that happiness isn't forever.
Within a week, I got attached to someone so strongly.
Within a week, I learned how to let them go and move on.
Not that I want to forget them or anything.
Rather, I want to relive his presence in my memories.
I went on a rollercoaster of emotions, and it all happened within a week.
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