They flow

The tears kept falling, just like the raindrops outside the window, gathering into muddy puddles in the pothole-ridden road below. She told herself she wasn’t alone—that the universe understood her pain and was grieving with her. It was the only way she could reassure herself that her heart wasn’t breaking in solitude, shattering silently into a million pieces.

The pain of longing, the ache of loss, was hard to suppress. It had been rising all day, ever since she signed the papers in court and officially buried her two-decade-old marriage.

She was only 21 when she got married. It hadn’t been a love marriage, but by the time the wedding came around, she had already fallen for Vivek. And now, twenty years later, Vivek had moved on—while she was left to pick up the pieces, to relearn everything: how to live, how to breathe, how to imagine a life without him.

She had to learn how to be alone. To find herself.
And that was terrifying.
She didn’t know what she might discover—or whether she would like the woman she would find beneath the ruins.

But for now, she just needed the tears.
She needed to let them wash over her, to cry until there was nothing left to mourn.
Because today, and those tears, were something she had earned. Something she needed.