Love Story

She was 38, he was 33. They met, they loved, and they went their own ways never to think about each other except when the other shoved his or her way out from the depths of subconscious. She travelled far and wide; he stayed behind his computer and wrote stories, inspired from his own experiences, he would tell people.

He drank coffee and wine at an artistic café, talking of the beautiful things in life and the joys and sorrows it brought along with it. The romance of his appearance dissolved in the delectable tones of his voice never failed to catch audience and they stuck helplessly in his honeyed words tasting and reveling in the saccharine quality of his voice. Enmeshed in the golden threads of his voice and words, they eventually asked him what he did for a living. “I strain my being through the gaps between black and white,” he’d say very loftily. It was at that moment that the golden threads either snapped or turned to titanium chains around the minds of all those who got ensnared in the angst of this genius whose soul found no succor except in the “gaps between black and white”.

“A hundred little tales spin out of a man’s life,” he’d say, “and his being begs to find niches where these isolated tales make sense. I only lead my tales to these crevices and bask in their fire-fly like sudden bursts of meaning.” It was only when he had successfully ensnared his quarry that he would let them partake of the heaven he had so mellifluously described. They loved every word he wrote and bought him a glass of wine to prove it. Why do you not publish, they would ask him.  A mysterious smile, a mere veil to the scared little boy that he was, would greet them. They would be further enraptured by his enigma.

He had written about her, too, made her the heroine he had wished to see and was scared to find. Her wind burnt face and her rough tresses had the glory of a hundred distant galaxies, he wrote. Their love was short and intense and had left a solitary print as only a droplet of lava could leave on a tender leaf, he had said. Embellishments had made his love story so poignant that sighs, he believed, were inevitable. In due course, his embellishments were the only real memories he had of her.

She had travelled so many more miles since she had met him. She was a jet set travel photographer and the only beauty was the unconscious inanimate one unfolding itself around us, she’d say. Camera and picturesque instants in an ebb and flow of nature were the need of her soul, she’d say. People were expendables or tour guides. The zenith of their utility was reached when a certain sample of humanity turned out to be a particularly knowledgeable native who knew the nooks and crannies of all things local and beautiful.

She sat in her tent, cigarette between her dusty fingers, editing pictures. Sometimes, the pictures would remind her of her fellow beings who had served their purpose and whom she had politely bid farewell thanking god that she would not see them again. When there was a twinge in that prayer of gratitude, she brushed aside the sentimentality to edit the next picture.

A worthless fling was all she remembered it as. That her travel weary toes had found a temporary permanence which had soothed her for the moment was something she remembered only for a few days afterwards. Then the sunsets and the crowds of the new cities, the new skylines and the hurtling waves had reduced her short breath of unidentified bliss to a tawdry affair she would only repeat in anecdotes. With each sunset, the affair grew more ridiculous and was diminished to a tale behind a few pictures that she was particularly proud of. It would have cost her life’s last breath to admit that it was an instant of genuine affection that had passed between the two of them. How could it have been genuine if it had vanished later, she had reasoned initially before discarding the story in its gravity and morphing it into a clown with ill fitted clothes and a big red nose.

Neither of them knew how complete the tale of their love had been. That they had met and loved had been only a background to the entire husk that they had both converted the instance to. Its lingering hollowness was probably the only sufferer. But when has vacuum ever complained of destruction?

 

Ink

Typing her woes away was her favorite pastime. Spilling all the acid on paper was a hobby. How she collected all that toxic waste, no one knew. She never told anyone how she went, hiding from bush to bush, tree to tree, rock to rock, collecting every miserable suffering that there was for her to collect. When she couldn’t find any of her own or even concoct any, she would start sucking up the anguish of others. And in a big dark bottle she collected all of it.When she put it on paper, her fingers bled. The acid would seep back into her instead of finding its way out. Yet, day after day, she opened her dark bottle and used all the torment within as her ink. Pain, tears and blood scratched her paper till it was almost burnt.

Then one day, she ran out of paper. She didn’t know what to do with all the ink. She thought she could drink it. She put it by her bedside and decided to think about it in the morning.

Morning came, and she tripped over the pot of torment and every scream that lay within spilled over her feet and flooded the room. For an instant, she didn’t think she could breathe. She ran out of there and the ink followed her, clung to her feet, like a leech.

Tripping over this tremendous leech, she went outdoors. The fresh air made the leech wither and her lungs felt like they were on fire. Toxin free environment was abominable to her. But going back inside meant being inundated in the sordid ink of her misery; using it controllably as ink was all too good, but the spillage was more than she could take.

Running until her lungs gave out, she came across some more paper. She wanted to write, but the ink which had stuck to her feet like a parasite had long since shriveled up like snail under salt. She scratched some blood out of her fingers and made a mark on the paper. It glittered. She wrote with her blood again. It was not the misery filling her anymore. It was the freshness of paper which secretly seeped into her blood.