Affliction

ClockTree Park

No one knew what to do.  They tried everything incessantly. Like in their daily lives, they never stopped. Time and time again, they would find her enjoying a sunset or looking at cats for hours, they said in the news. Family members and friends alike were stuck in this spiral of concern and personal defeat for not being able to change things. At the hospital, the doctors had never seen such a difficult case. The police set up a perimeter around the city to catch her and take her in for treatment. People could not accept the fact that there was one person in the city who simply enjoyed doing nothing in particular instead of always doing something. She would disappear and hide, they thought, where she could not be found for weeks. On one of these occasions, a man walked past the small rowboat where she was resting. He thought this must be the woman everyone talked about in the news, the one who was terribly ill. At first, he stayed far away. He really didn’t want to catch anything. But then he decided to walk up to her. She looked at him and smiled. She did not look that ill, he thought. She waved and motioned him to sit down next to her. The rowboat was a bit unstable, understandably, but he managed to sit and looked at what she was looking. He was speechless. He had never noticed how blue the sky was. He had never noticed the birds and the cat on the shore. He had never noticed how nice it felt to be cradled by the soft waves. He looked at her and knew. He was now ill too. But for the life of him, he just could not understand why this was considered such a terrible affliction.

Writer's Dash