Something called Love

{Fiction}



“I missed you” the first time she heard it, her heart fluttered.. his feeling found words while hers still ached in her heart..  she swallowed and fought her tears.. it took him two whole years of separation from her to realize this and 6 more months to finally blurt this out in a party, to which they both seem to have decided to go only to catch a glimpse of the other person. He had looked into her eyes and said it sincerely and meant it.  Their relation dated back to their college days, where they experienced love and romance and lust for the first time in their life. Her concept of love and his were different as night and day or as any men or woman would want. When his thoughts hit the right side or the pendulum she was swinging towards the left. He sought to take it slow and she fancied extreme steps like marriage, acceptance and eloping more than anything she needed confirmation.

That was the point when he felt that things were moving very fast, her demands and love suffocated him like overdose of sweetness, he panicked, advocated this sabbatical, she accepted, to satisfy him, to shut him and to have him come back she waited for 2 years doting her love for him as much as or even more than the love as such. If he had noticed it then, she would have made a good beloved and understanding wife, the one he always wanted, the one his hypocritical mind ridiculed but craved for, in those endless fantasies.

Meeting again after 2 years, and with those magical words they were together again, like there never was a split-up. Soon they settled into their pre-separation era and continued their episodes with more passion and fire and vigour. Her days were filled with his memories and his.. waiting for the moments with her. Apart from the regular clichés and hormones there was something else that made them come together, they felt that they were meant to be together.

To a normal eye, she was a typical modern woman secretly crying over her fat and blunt nose and he an epitome of gloominess and was a more depressed version of her, a simple man indulging in his dark fantasies unspotted behind his locked and dark room of his parents apartment and ridiculing them in broad day light before others. But together their veil lifted. To her, his erotic fantasies were an obligation of her beauty and her submission an victory to him.

They continued their courtship and romance with the same vigour for few more months until one day he wakes up again feeling different and that they were not similar at all. He then casually and unintentionally sprinkled that idea into her with his fights… pointed glances and double ended dialogues. He enjoyed overpowering her with the doubts.. but why? He never knew.. but it worked and started to go ablaze and shook the whole foundation of them. It alarmed her, on a fateful day, they argued, cried, pacified, sympathized each other competing to walk out as the more pained and suffered one, as the one that can be un-guilty and blame the other for this situation and call themselves cheated and call it a sacrifice. Like serendipity both their untouched coffees were removed by two different waiters separately. Then the boy and girl, I like to call them as a boy and girl or a man and women and not give them a name, a name detaches them from me and us, without name they are in us and around us. So the boy and the girl walked away in their separate ways.

After three more years, when she lay sprawled in her room after a long day’s work, undisturbed by the storm outside she receives an email with only a “I missed you”. After a delay, she sat up and cried into the phone.

I understood that she was crying because he took the phone and walked away to the bathroom and started pacifying her. I lay in the bed awake on contrary to his thoughts that I was sound asleep and his voice was chocking. I listened turned to the other side of bed with silence, just  the way I listened on my wedding night when he recited to me about his love and the girl with rough hands and probably soft bosom. To me.. it is something… called love..  

{Fiction}

Restless

I felt it again today, the constricted feel in my chest.. no amount of water or medicine would make it go away.. it stayed.. and pained.. The restlessness. I felt it when I saw the little girl get into the car with a man in the middle of the night.  She was not so little, might be in her early twenties. She looked like a girl of thirteen, lost in a big fair.. her features still has not lost its innocence, although her eyes and heart had.

Traveling at night was not my option, the darkness scares me, like there was still something lurking behind those dark drapes ready to ambush my heart. But my I.T job demands it and I don’t hesitate now. Nights to be used to be the safest time for me, locked in my house, comforted by my blanket, assured that even the slightest noise would bring my mom to my side.. I slept as a child dreaming and wondering about my own fairy tales. But now, the moment my office cab reaches my street, I search and spot the only house fully lit up and the short plump anxious figure of my mom waiting in the balcony and I feel safe again… but the little girl..!

Am I pitying her? I used to wonder.. I am not sure.. may be I do and may be I don’t.. ! As my philosophical friend calls it being chaste at heart is much tougher than at body, and in his eyes every women are the same.. not so pure..! I half agree with him, the rest half I ignore..

So I sat to contemplate, when did I feel restless before? Well I don’t remember, but I remember the first time I felt so..  I was in my teen and enjoying the first bus ride alone in my life.. I had pleaded my overprotective father for it. I got into the bus from my school, got a seat and was enjoying the view both inside and outside the bus. Faces and places equally fascinate me.  In one of the faces, I saw pain. She was a girl of my age, and probably going back home from school too! Her eyes wandered pleadingly at every women in the bus, but no one saw it. The bus was overcrowded, and just behind her stood a guy too close to her.

At first I did not notice his hands, but the constant movement of those filthy hands made me look harder and I saw his hands move from the girls hip until her arm pit. She pushed them away, pinched it turned to the side, but nothing stopped him, he continued harassing her. I looked away in disgust.. the bile welled up my food pipe, I felt restless for the first time in life. I got down from the bus as soon as possible and got home in a cab. I did not know if any one helped her. But I knew that it left a deep impact in her and in me, and I still cannot forget that day.. even after 10 years..

Was it guilt then? The realization that I didn’t/couldn’t help? Or the personal fear for my own? I am not sure.. or the overwhelming knowledge of bad and evil in the world.. of what lies behind those dark drapes…

 I wish to change and remove the knowledge of good and evil..  but if it leaves me… will I be innocent again..?

As this circle is like life and death.. death always comes after life.. leaves life to heel or bleed.. and then take one away. Knowledge always comes after ignorance as comprehension leaving the scars..!