Today as he sat down to write, he tried to figure out an appropriate opening sentence for his story. A sentence that would define the storm brewing inside him since the last one year. A year of colossal losses, losses that can’t be shared, losses that can’t be put into words. Yet here he was, trying to do the impossible deed of defining it all in one single sentence. He gazed, as the shimmering ink of his fountain pen fell on the paper, making a blot on it. A blot that symbolized the year gone by. It started to cover the bright white paper and its clear lines under it, making them disappear into the darkness of its color as if they never existed there.

“I need that blot. It reminds me of myself under the clouds of hatred and depression”, he thought to himself. Soon the blot started spreading itself along the paper, consuming the other lines underneath it. “Maybe I should just turn the page”, he wondered. But what good would that do? Would it remove the blot from the page he was trying to write his story on? No. He needed to stick to that page itself and find a way to stop the ink from spreading across. So, he decided to blow some air onto it, an air of change. He parched the river that was flooding his life dry and made it stop in its tracks.

The stains of the ink were now permanent. They would stay with his story, but would not affect it any further. Any line he tried to write, would now be free from the clutches of the advancing ink, but it would forever be etched into his story, reminding him of the days when his life was as dark as it appears on the top of that page and how he struggled to find some light through it all. The light, under whose shadow, he sits now. And so, he put the opening sentence of his story, into the title of mine.