By Sheetal V.Bhonsle
Life is unpredictably agonizing! Alas!
You’re enjoying the excitement of a long-awaited vacation, the very first minute and the next, the noise of gunfire rocks the world.
You're caught in a tragic stampede as you go out to celebrate a hard-earned victory, full of pride and laughter.
Whether you are travelling for work or pleasure, you board a plane with hopes in mind, but destiny determines it will never touch down. With books and ambition in hand, you're studying in peace in your hostel when a plane crashes out of the sky, ending everything before it really starts.
These kinds of moments rock us to our very core. They serve as a reminder of how incredibly delicate and heartbreaking our lives are. That regardless of how much we plan, how much we dream, there’s a silence in the skies, a chaos in the crowd, a randomness in tragedy that cares nothing for innocence.
While the survivors lay strewn across hospital beds and silent prayer halls, their bodies trembling from shock, their minds clawing to accept the nightmare they had just lived through—grappling with wounds too deep for stitches and traumas too dark for words—on the other side of the veil, the departed souls of wandered in dazed silence, and didn’t know they were gone.
Disoriented and weightless, they hovered near the wreckage, calling out to loved ones who would never again hear their voices. Some tried to re-enter the remains of their broken bodies—bodies that lay twisted in unnatural ways, scorched by fire, scattered across cold earth, limbs missing, eyes still wide in disbelief. But the flesh would not welcome them back. It was no longer theirs.
A child’s soul tried to wake her mother, not knowing her mother was already cradling her in death. A young man stared at his own charred hands, desperately trying to piece together moments he could no longer remember. There was no light. No tunnel. Only confusion, silence, and the unbearable grief of not knowing how—or why—it all ended.
In an outlying area, the woman sat frozen at the airports waiting lounge, her boarding pass still on the table. She had missed the flight by ten minutes.
At first, she had cursed herself.
Now, with tears streaming down her cheeks and hands trembling in disbelief, she fell to her knees and thanked God she wasn't sure she even believed in.
She had lived.
But in her heart, she carried the unbearable weight of knowing that so many others hadn’t.
Our hearts ache for those lost – for their stories left untold, for the families that will never be whole again. And in those aching moments, we’re reminded of the sanctity of every breath, every heartbeat, and every fleeting embrace. We are small, yes – but in that smallness lies the immense beauty and sorrow of being human.