March 11, 2011

Short Story- 18

(Attempt at a piece of love-writing. Bear with me if it sounds dumb and hollow! :P)

Last night, you came in my dream. After...what...ten months?! And today, I've not forgotten you. Yet.

All those words are coming back. The ones you used to sweet talk me to silence. How could I speak? Words seemed so inappropriate. I was hoping my silence was more eloquent.

The same colour rushes to my face now as it did when you used that voice of yours to claim me for your own. This time, the colour rises for other reasons- anger? pain?

Or is it embarassment? At having bared open my soul to you and let you camp there? It took me so long to painfully pull out keg after keg that firmly kept your tent down. And every time I removed a keg, my flesh hurt. Smarted with all the love I had just imagined.

Thank god for the distance that separated us- then and now. Blessed distance that kept me safe from my vulnerability.

But sometimes, I wonder, would distance have actually made these plain talks, real? Made meaning of what seems like a stretch of once-upon-a-times?

Today you refuse to go...image stuck in my eyes. Persistance of vision and memory. The colour of your smile...once a cool aquamarine to my senses, now a murky un-understandable brown. Those little crinkles around the corner of your mouth...perfect geometric lines chiselled on to your face, now an ambiguous clutch of arrows shooting out everywhere. And then those almost brown eyes...aah... those that were both warm and cool, trusting and loving; now an intangible white mass with a black pinprick for an iris!

What happened to you? the you I knew, talked to, laughed with and shared life with? Did he die? Did he disappear? Did all the hopes and promises sublimate?

You have changed, and hence, I have changed, and when in dreams we meet, we live another lifetime, the one I once wished into my life!

*****************************************************************************

Coming soon... the journal pages from my two week trip to Landour(the lovely lovely world of Ruskin Bond)! :)

Blogsville, I am back! :D

1 comment

Anonymous said...

"The colour of your smile...once a cool aquamarine to my senses, now a murky un-understandable brown."

Reminds me of Bharati's 'Aasai mugam marandhu poche'. Forgetting a face is not so much about absence of memory as it is about its murkiness, isn't it. I enjoyed the piece :)

© Dryad's Peak
Maira Gall