Choice

She looks inside of her, breeding the growth thoughts, her own little dark room, developing images and impressions conjured upon reflecting on her experiences. She feels particularly empty today - unable to decide how to feel - random happenings trigger equally stray emotions in her. She wants to feel settled and keep the temperamental reactions at bay. Should she examine a old hurt and scrape new wounds out of it or hand pick a happy memory and  sculpt a smile in her heart? On days like these, where the congenital attraction towards deep, despondent contemplation tempts her a little firmly, she puts in that extra stab into her happy side. She looks at the play of light on the window panes, each piece of glass displaying their own perception of light onto them from the same exact reflection. She lets out a smile and decides for that to be the flavor of the day. Those lush green sprouts of bliss flooding her insides as she handpicks a precious little memory and relives it in her dark room.

The negatives magically drench in color offering a bright image to feast the senses upon and her dark room lights up in that flickering warmth.

Image Courtesy - Shail Mohan

Flight

A cup of tea,
Sans latte, if be.
Skip the sugar, the creamer too...
A cup of hot water would do.
A cup of water, if not hot!
Drop the cup if we come to that!
Two rattan chairs?
May be one..
Make it none - it should still be fun.
A book to read?
On second thought,
There's no need of that,
There's really not!
Breathing lungs,
A beating heart
Solitude, the missing part.
A piece of my sky,
Distant mountains serenading the eye
A balcony - creaky and small
Opening out His glory and all -
What else?  Where else? How else?
Let the breath escape
And gasp in bliss
Sinking into nature's abyss.


Pic Courtesy - Dhiren Shah

Union

He sits down with his laptop screen illuminating his face, cutting through the dimly lit room. She lies down next to him, facing the wall - "Where are you stuck, Mr.Hemingway?" She mocks without looking at him. "You aren't asleep yet?" He wonders aloud. "Not with your ambient lighting cutting through my sleep" she tries to sound intelligent. 

"I want to write a story" he says. "But my writer's block isn't budging anywhere tonight" He adds. "Reckon I could think up some interesting story to relate to you?" - "Throw in your ideas - I always win when you chime in" he says playfully. 

"Write about us" she says - "with a twist" - "Put us in a different plane - a situation other than where we are right now and imagine a story around it. What if we hadn't met as teens? what if we had met as kids and parted ways only to realize our love much later? What if we weren't this happily ever after?"

"Put us in a car, on a long drive - like soulmates that hadn't tied the knot. Like friends that hadn't met in college. You and I, meeting after a hiatus of eons, connecting like twin flames, sitting beside each other, holding hands, not breathing a word but somehow communicating volumes just with that chaste skin contact, You and I, on different continents, momentarily crossing paths, sharing a ride, weaving through a web of traffic, looking for an exit that doesn't show itself - you and I, sneaking away from the worlds we come from, desperate to know where our road is leading us to. Only to realize we do not have a destination to drive to. You and I, trying to enjoy the journey, the journey devoid of a definite stop - attempting all we can to hold each other's hands a little longer, and letting that silence pour out the vulnerabilities that are carefully wrapped away from the sight of the judging world. Us, looking through the windshield of the world and seeing it alike. Us, being in the same page of perception, harmonious in what we seek out of our escape. Our fingers entwined together like dark chocolate and caramel, creating a delicious and enticing contrast of hues - just like our thoughts entwine in all their diversity but the spirits merge in the oneness of an identical core. You and I, not like a wife and husband - heck, not even like a woman and a man but two bodies of energy that resonate and fuse together in a divine bond. You and I, like fluid love, flowing through the many creases of our hearts and cleansing those voids with the waters of compassion. Make us trap in a traffic jam actually - one of those really stuck up jams that neither let us  go forward nor backward - Let the dusk darken around us while the light of our love shines through the twilight. Let us be there, in that moment, without a care to get back home on time, without an agenda to impress each other, without the yearning to experience something beyond that very moment of togetherness - like co passengers, streaming through this web called life, not saying a word, not caring for where the path is leading us to but just in the comfort of that company, let you and me live a moment that is worth a hundred lifetimes"

"Sigh" He gasps - 'You make that sound like an epiphany" 

"I know" she quips - "I know" - "As long as you put us together, even if it is just one  long drive on a lone evening of our lives, it should be good enough. That solo moment should do"

"Go to bed, he ruffles her hair and whispers" - "Yeah right" She mocks - "Now that the ambient sound of your keyboard clicking unifies with the ambient light of your laptop screen, I should be well lulled into my dreamland"

They both smile. To themselves, thinking about the joy the other brings to them.

Picture courtesy - my friend the Amateur clicker, Dhiren Shah.

Oblivious

She basks in her unaware brilliance, never ever familiar of her own worth, She pauses and soaks in the beauty around her with the diligence of a machine. She is so submerged in that process of gasping, acknowledging and offering thanks to the blessings graced upon the world that it almost seems like a joke to a cynical pair of eyes. Her unfamiliarity with her own self looks like false modesty to some and utter naivety to others - worse yet, it makes some completely blind to her  virtues, as if the world conveniently ignores things that aren't highlighted, underscored and thrown into one's face with obvious egotism. But it isn't like she cares to know what the world thinks of her, or even would care upon knowing. But one day, he crosses her path - He that is touted as the finder of treasures. One look and he knows her invaluable worth. He wonders if it is her merit that makes her so insanely attractive to him, or her unwitting blindness towards it. He falls in love, head first, heels atop! He is determined to win her over, show her the mirror and make her look at what she looks through - the latent heart of gold that gleams bright, concealed under the mask of her ignorance. "I am in love with you" He confesses. "Why?" She asks, instead of saying  "Me too" - The unacquainted darling that is too busy acquainting herself with the allure outside of her.

Photo credit - Dhiren Shah.