Untitled

I don’t know why I think of you so much even now when you have gone so far away, when fate had decided long back that we wouldn’t be together. I remember you with every song that I hear, every breath I take and every sight I see – I still think that it would have been so lovely if you had been by my side. I whisper your name every other instant, with no particular purpose; it escapes me unconsciously just like the breath I take. I write poems thinking of you. I even dance with you in the realms of my imagination. Remember that night when we had danced secretly in the dimly lit corner of the street we lived in? I still think of that. I think of your smile, your assuring voice, your gentle gaze and feel the warmth of your grasp as vividly as I had felt it the last time you ever held my hand. I still love you for the fact that you loved me beyond my famed eccentricities.

I am lost in the past. Do you even have a clue? The world would surely see me as a lunatic – a love-lost-lunatic steeped in a past that has withered away to obscurity - if not for the effectiveness with which I cloak this supposed insanity with my role as a writer. What do they know? I live on clutching the bag of priceless memories.

I try to imagine how you would look now. But my imagination fails me miserably. My imagination, it appears, only aids the birth of the written word but not the sight of your face. It’s only memory that roars like a ferocious lion, sending imagination whimpering into a dim corner. Try how much ever, I see your face every time the way I saw it last.

Let me tell you about the biggest paradox of my life. The last time I saw you – it’s been so long; so long that a child practising counting with fingers would grow tired of counting. 27 – that was all you were when you left me. Four years– that was all the time we had lived for as a married couple. And then, you just left – left me as simply as a tender dew that slips off a blade of grass just as it is meant to do in the large framework of destiny. Well, the paradox is that my dear, with every passing minute, the years have counted up, but you have only grown closer to me and have come so close that my words fail to describe.

The truth is perhaps that you have dissolved within me as pure, unadulterated thoughts.

And for no strange reason, I want to title this untitled piece ’80 and still in love’.