Short Story 24 : My Last Goodbye.

Metafiction

Metafiction is a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, storytelling, and directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts.
Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.

  

*** 

My Last Goodbye.

 She is going to kill me! The bitch!

I cannot believe it! I mean, she created me after all. She is my mother…mom, or so I thought.

Didn’t she give me a lovely heart-shaped face, a beautiful figure, wonderful clothes to wear, a great job, and a high level of intelligence too? I thought she loved me. How can she kill me?

Me? Nisha, the wonderful girl with a heart of gold. Nisha, the girl who won awards at school and accolades at work. She made me so wonderful when she created me, I’ve been over the moon with joy and pride.

It was short-lived though, because she made some rather horrid things to happen to me, just a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday too! I mean I met with an accident, lost my new bike and had a scuffle with my boss, all in a single day. All thanks to her whims. And while I was still reeling from all that, she made me lose Rahul, my boyfriend of three years!

Can you imagine all that happening to one person in such a short time? Yes, you got that right. Anything can happen in life, the more the strife, the merrier it is for you, the reader.

And so, she made me go through a terrible betrayal and broke my heart in the worst possible way. Not only did Rahul have a fling with that weak little bitch called Anita, he also blamed me for not being ‘enough’ for him! Just imagine, reader. An average looking guy with average brains actually lands a girl like me, and has to the gall to say I’m not enough!

Well, seriously reader, I have had enough.

This woman is the most heartless bitch I’ve ever come across, even worse than that Anita, the bane of my life until now. And mind you, Anita’s sole purpose of existence is that of breaking my heart!  This, after Rahul, my boyfriend, proposed to me just the week before!  I know, I know, reader. The best reason for a man to cheat on his woman is insecurity. And so, of course, it had to be me that bore the brunt of his betrayal. I was so enraged, not just with Rahul and Anita, but with my mother too for doing this to me, for making me go through the worst pain ever…

I wanted to kill myself the day mom described in minute detail, how Rahul lies through his teeth to me and spends his weekends with that bitch… even the gross love scenes between them…I died a slow death that day.

And do you know the worst part? I wasn’t allowed to make out with Rahul, not even once. All I got to do was kiss him a few times and I had to stay chaste, prim and proper even then. I couldn’t be a slut like Anita, could I?

Oh No! I’m a good girl, mind you.

Gorgeous-looking, intelligent, good girls do not indulge in desperate sex with average-looking losers, except in Chetan Bhagat books, of course.  And all good girls in the world only fall in love with bad guys, as a rule.

And I’m a classy, elegant, super-smart, stunning, high-flying achiever. A girl who knows her worth and means NO when she says ‘No’. And so, all she allowed me to do was kiss Rahul a few times, let him to grope around a bit, and then refuse to sleep with him, because, well girls don’t do that ‘too soon’, even after three years of being with him. I mean, seriously?

As if that wasn’t enough, she ensured that I lost my job last night because she claimed that I was unable to concentrate on my work after my heartbreak.

This is what she makes me endure, when I know for a fact that she’s been having flings with three different guys in the last month alone.

And just when I thought that I’d be a phoenix of sorts, to show the world how strong I am, how I gather my will power and resilience to emerge stronger from the experience, she ruined my life yet again by giving me an incurable disease to die of!

Well, how ironic that I must lose everything I value in life and then life itself, while mom enjoys her life with all the men she chooses to...In fact how do you think I know she plans to do away with me?

I heard her talking last night, in bed with her best friend’s husband. She blew smoke all over my pages and told him that she was gonna give me a cancer and kill me off after three months. I went numb with shock, reader. This was way worse than Rahul’s betrayal!

They actually discussed the best way to murder me, the heartless inhuman demons. He suggested that I should meet with a gory accident and have both my limbs chopped off under a tempo traveller! Can you imagine such monstrousness? But then, she turned out even worse.

‘No, Nisha can’t go as easily as that!’ I heard her quip, as she coolly sipped iced champagne. ‘Nisha needs to suffer more, a lot more…that’s what would make the readers of her story cry their hearts out and recommend it to their friends…’

I mean, dear readers, what a crappy story, if there ever was one!

Tell me, dear readers, why do you pick up a book to read?

To forget your own woes for some time, to be happy, to read some good prose and leave with a smile, a feeling, a connection…right?

Obviously not. You, the readers, have changed over the years. There was a time when you read good literature…Dickens, Bronte, Austen, Twain, Wilde , Hemingway or Kalam. Today, dear readers all you want is sex, sleaze, cheap thrills and instant gratification. You readers neither have the class or intelligence to enjoy good literature nor the patience or inclination to read classic work.

And so, my mom, the celebrated author, feels that she has to cater to you, the new breed of readers and write absolute crap under the guise of contemporary literature.

Couldn’t she have spared all the details of that cheap fling between Rahul and Anita, for instance? No, the great woman needed to add in five pages of the sleazy shit she calls 'erotica' for her slimy readers and she couldn’t have done that with me. As I already mentioned before, I am a good girl, you know.

And so, dear reader, I’m gonna die tonight. Yes, tonight. You see, although I am supposed to live in painful agony for 3 more months, thankfully it will soon be over, because it would take only a few minutes, a few hours or at most two days for her finish describing my anguish on her pages and finally kill me.

After all this time too. Unbelievable how heartless she can be. And for what? Just to make her stupid story better.

After all, like some smart guy said, ‘The beginning of your story sells your first book. The ending sells your next one.’

And all these authors want is to sell their pathetic books. The dimwits. And look at all the lengths they go to, just to do that!

I am after all the main protagonist of her book. Killing me would make her book fly off the shelves.

So you see, the three months that I experience in my world, are only a matter of two minutes for you, in your world.

You are lucky to be where you are, dear reader. You are lucky to be free, unlike me.

If only I could be free too…free from the pages of a book, free from the complete clutches of a mad woman who has the absolute power to control my life, feelings, and my destiny in accordance with her whims and moods, with a mere scribble of her pen.

My destiny is fused in my author’s ink, dear reader.  It is penned to suit your sensibilities and  is  fastened forever, within the leaves of the manuscript. I remain entangled for eternity, sealed within the spine that holds the pages in its clutches, the pages of a book you read and probably discard, without second thought.

Do remember me sometime, dear reader. After all, I was created for you, to die for you, wasn’t I?

And you are free to go on and live your life as you wish to live it. You have the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and shape your own destiny as you’d envision it to be.

Go dear reader, go and write your own destiny.

And this, my reader is the last goodbye from me.

***

Images : Surreal/Deviant art, Google.