The loose ends….

Her creamy long fingers, it kept tracing virtual hazy lines on the sides of the cup before her. I don’t think she was noticing it but I was. We all tend to do this, push ourselves into a self induced state of hibernation, when we are not sure about what to say or what face to make. I even call it a crippled form of meditation, you shut off all your senses and be with own selves, with the aid of some balmy recurring gestures.

I looked around the café, the peculiar red- white ambient hall with couplet combos sprayed around. But we stood out, like an odd piece of cake that just lost the cherry from its crown. The most spotted aberration was that we belonged to the greyer side of life’s timeline and unlike the other duos; we were not with each other. We preferred our glare to be on the coffee mug or the piece of brownie before us rather than on each other’s face.  There was some huge dark mist of weird crampedness for words between us. And it was showing all over, from the way we paste that phony smile on our face.

It wasn't always like this or I should say that it was never like this. There were times in our story, when this same café canvas gave murals of completely different shades. Words were never in short between us, as both of us boasted ourselves to be some charmers in it, playing with words and thoughts.

 I slowly looked down to have a sight of her feet. Something that I used to do with a sort of idiotic innocence, checking out her feet every time we met. “NO, you can’t see it. It’s inside my shoes” her words stopped me well before my gaze reached its destination.  “Why” it was more sort of a reflex from me than a genuine query. I don’t know if my bulged eye balls did the trick, but I saw her face gleaming with that old famous smile, with the least tint of “FAKEISM”. Seems like time has done some cruel injustice with her smile, it’s still the same, untouched by its heavy wheels. Twenty long years, it had its heavy toll on me. My eyes had gone framed behind those hard rimmed glasses and the salt part has started to prevail over the pepper ones among the strands on my scalp.

And in no time, I felt that we were flowing back, paddling ourselves against the cosmic ripples that stripped us away. Suddenly we were in no short of topics to talk. Smiles gave way to selfless laughter and soon we were the “SWEET NUISANCE”. It’s not always your age or your body that makes you old, but it’s your world. Time went streaming away unnoticed and it took the high pitched shrill of my cell phone to prick me off that short lived reliving minutes. The call was nothing, but a pull back, to the narrow barren strips of my inane ways. We stood up to leave, and the café seem to be so muted. I looked back to the seat we occupied, to find if there were some new colors to it. No, nothing. Candied moments are like that, short lived and cruel. They die leaving no marks or cross.

She offered to share the shade of her umbrella to keep me dry from the pour down. The funny thing about sharing an umbrella is that it doesn't serve its purpose but it serves a lot of other things

. And during that short walk to my car, I was thinking about the sweet young couple that once we were. In midst of the thousand reasons to stay together we succeeded in finding a couple of reasons to part, a few legal cycles and that’s all it took. The word “freedom” has a bloody stink to it, once you start being more aggressive about that notion. Those were days when I was intoxicated with the whims of freeing and flying and fought, fought hard, till it bled. Space was in plenty to breath and by then I started missing the old pent and shackles of love.

I forcefully freed myself from the thought whirls and was getting ready to set rolling. I could        still see her walking back, through the side mirror of my car. And then I read this

“OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”

And I couldn't resist the smile as I turned the key.