Sunday, September 27, 2015

I wish you hadn’t begun the conversation the way you did and that you hadn’t left the door open. Perhaps, on another day we wouldn’t have walked that path. But again this was a different day and a different you and me.

The glass was broken and strewn all across the floor. We had a choice not to walk on it. In the end, while you stayed by your corner and watched me cut my heels on it, I walked out of the door and stumbled on the stairs and died a little death by the threshold before picking myself up and being lost to the world.

What has been amazing about this whole episode is that not a single drop was shed, not a word uttered or a cry heard. A dignified, but painful silence enveloped everything as we forked our individual paths to nowhere. Perhaps in days ahead, you will realize that you were captive to your own thoughts and there never really was a tether holding you back in the first place.

When I think about it now, I feel that I am the stranger you always hoped to meet but never actually met. The listlessness that you craved for and the sweet tinge that you always associated with love was never felt. I guess all this while, I strove hard to cause you that heartache that you always thought would be your calling and kiss of true love on your soul. I guess it just had to be someone else, anyone else but me.

Alternate In a parallel life with an alternate ending, I would’ve held your arm and drawn you close and you would have fit into my being like you have always done. We might have wound up together, coiled into one big mess of sheets and dreamy eyes and loud music and coffee on the bed.  But, then it had to be the other life. The life without regrets, without the decisions that we made earlier and maybe scripted on a different paper with a different ink.

In this life, however, the bricks around us remind us of who we are against who and what we could have been. The chapped plaster and the falling paint mocks me for envisioning a life other than this. The mortar and cement that scorches a day and melts it into a woeful night brings me back to my desk, feeding another morsel to my chained soul.

The alternate ending gets trashed. I key in the final obituaries and draw the curtains cutting the light and air and hoping for the suffocation to douse the fire within.


3 comments :

The Cloudcutter said...

I love this line: "I strived hard to cause you that heartache that you always thought would be your calling..."

It's so true, much as we want to be the cause of someone's joy, there is also a twisted sense of delight in causing heartache... Just so we know we made a difference.

How do we know said...

Like you said, It didn't have to be this way. Our beginnings don't have to determine the conclusions of our stories. Not even if the earlier twists and turns have given the story a pattern.

Himanshu Tandon said...

@CC - I agree, but then the sadistic pleasure of causing a heartache would be a celebration only if you go back and make up for it.

@HDWK - How often does one get a chance to gather the courage and swim against the flow and reverse an otherwise inevitable ending? Most conclusions are a lost cause and in the end, they won't really matter. Will they?

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