Love Confessed

The sun is making his way home. The sky is dressing itself pink. The weather is turning cold, but in no way is it near to the chill I am feeling inside me. That I have always felt for days now. I stare at the girl with the violin who is hanging on the wall, framed. She is sad like a lost love. How close she resembles me. I shrug at the idea. I take my large mug of coffee and succumb into my little couch with the box in my other hand. The box I have opened and closed a million times in the past 456 days. The box I wish is an illusion, and that it didn’t even exist. Like it is a nightmare. But here it is resting peacefully in my palm, arousing a destructive storm in me. A heavy heart with a light box!

Tomorrow is going to be a milestone in my life. I am about to receive my award for the best book of the year. “THE BEST BOOK” I smirk at the words. The thought makes me laugh and cry at the same instant. Laugh for never in my wildest dreams I thought I would become a writer, and cry at the thought that made me one. I open the box and take the frail old sheet of paper with fold marks and fading letters. Blotted here and there with drops of tears. The paper tired of overtime. I held it gently to my heart and closed my eyes, to feel the evening glow I had felt years back to embrace me once again, to flow back in time, to reside in past that would never be my future…

Arjun. He was beside me. His bronze hair swaying in the wind, untidy. His dark eyes scanning my paper but his focus on me. Those eyes, I would trade anything for them to be mine. We were at the stadium of our college, busy with final year project and the blessed evening that was perfect in its own way.

“Your words today…on that paper you scribbled! It was um…awesome actually”, he stammered, failing to sound casual though he tried to.

“Thank you”, I said without glancing up, but couldn’t suppress the smile. He had always been my secret crush from the first day I saw him. But I was too much a coward.

“Try a poem”. Was it an order or a suggestion? I didn’t know. But there was something irresistible in the way he said. Something deep. Something demanding. 

I looked up at the soft sun that crowned the ground and the trees that danced to the song of breeze. The sun, which was bidding a goodbye with its long orange rays, caressing us.

Each beginning has a grace

So has the end,

Like the rays that cover me in gold

You drench me in love.

Each passing second is bliss in hell

For my love is unconfessed!

   

My words were short. I couldn’t continue with the flow. There was a lump in my throat choking me when I heard the words I spoke. But they were the voice of my heart, with strings loosened. When I was done I realized, I was staring right into his eyes. His was fixed on mine. His glance made my eyes drop down. I smiled shyly. He took my hand in his. The sun kissed faces of youth tinted with the blush of pink. Even Apollo would have envied the ambience that suffocated with love and romance. The sun has set with the rise of a new moon. The chapter of love, marked with forever.

…I open my eyes, still in trance. A thousand memories flashing through my restless mind. I remember everything, exactly the way things were. Like watching the dust through the cleanest glass. Our days out, days in. Each love filled words and sweetest smiles. Love notes and little gifts. I was high on love. But yeah the graph of my mark sheet sloped low though! Well, who cared…but he did.

Unlike my parents, he always wanted me to study hard and have some goal. He firmly believed in life with purpose and well, women empowerment. He was an optimist and believed in right kind of equality. He always tried to cheer me up, I was too much immersed in love that I had time for nothing, except him. I was like a carefree butterfly flying high, dependent on its wings, while he wanted me to learn to walk. He was my wings!

“Hey babe! Here, fill this”, he handed me some papers.

“What is this?” I asked confused trying to understand what it was.

“Application form. For the post of junior editor of the writer’s column in, you know what… THE HINDU. My friend was pretty impressed with your tinny whinny poems and helped me in this”, he boasted as if I am gonna make something out of it. I had never trusted me in anything. At least not much as he had.  

“What! Junior editor…THE HINDU…what’s all this crap uh! And how could you show all my letters to some stupid friend of yours, they were meant for you and only you and you are showcasing it to…how could you even…Arjun damn you!”, the words were harsher than I intended it to be but not more than I felt it. He had always tried to make me do something but this was too much. How could he make his some friend read me? Anger seethed in me. But I controlled it as much I could. I didn’t want some damn job create fissure in us. I was frozen by the way he reacted.

“Not all, just few. And now if you don’t want this what are you gonna do? You are no more a hippie teenager hanging around in college’, he was composed but his eyes showed some kind of seriousness. He had reached his limit trying to push me. He went cold like a stone. Yeah, he is serious about this proposal and this is nth time I am rejecting one.

‘C’mon man, I am gonna be the happy bride of a handsome businessman. I will be the queen of my kingdom”, I winked and put on some air as I sat beside him cuddling into his arms. I tried a distraction. But it wasn’t a success.

He neither moved nor said anything.

…… what followed then is something I always deny to rewind. The most excruciating memory I behold. There had been misunderstandings before, but there was always a happy ending. I wanted to have the same here too, but I know it never had!

On each fight I was able to pull in the strings, but not this time. Every time I had words but then I was stranded with just tears. I was nothing except for my beauty that would eventually wither. Was it my fault that I was raised in a way that I never needed an ambition? I was always behind bars and I grew used to it that I never wanted to fly. Dream, it was him and talent I wasn’t loaded.

…days passed and seasons changed. But the pain was still burning and his memories were like oil to the lamp. How long can I put up with this hell, I wondered. I am not some stupid to cry over someone who ditched me. I decided to channelize my pain into art, into the only form I know. Each pain turned into words and my misery transformed into a book. Fame and money with a hollow life…..

Tuk, tuk! A knock on the door interrupting the train in my mind. I am irked. It isn’t just a memory but the favorite tune I play day and night, that which keep humming its presence in my ears. I open the creaky door, but was rooted to the spot lips zipped.

GOSH! It is him, Arjun. The same lean frame, spiky bronze hair, chiseled face that made girls go insane. The same face that had haunted me every inch. The same dark eyes I had admired. The same brown skin I believed I owned. But the angelic face was like stone, expressionless.

A drop of tear on my cheeks and his. That is all we could share. My hands tremble as they make their way to his face. But couldn’t dare touch him, for I fear. He is my hallucination that would vanish at my touch.

I open the paper in my palms, that I never let go off.

“I DON’T WANT A NOTHING”

Are the only words, his final message. The message I reread a thousand times. The only message I wanted to prove wrong. That which I did. The award would be mine tomorrow. A perfect proof! A cocktail of emotions trying to escape through every pore, but somehow arrested in the arteries and veins. Everything is on pace but nothing is. My eyes are seeing only him. My ears are hearing only his heartbeat.

He smiles at me. A smile that disappeared somewhere between his lips and eyes.

“Walk me to the box it was in, if at you still have it”, he says. The voice I had died all these days to hear. But it isn’t the same that had always ringed in my ears. It is adorned with pain that it is piercing my ear.

I take him in. He held the box and turned it upside down. There is another room that I had never noted. He opened the door and took another sheet of paper old but fresh.

I don’t want the darkness

But the sky with moon and stars,

The flower isn’t alive

Without the fragrance it spreads!

Words were unspoken

So was your talent,

I won’t fall

Until you bloom

And when you do

I will hold you.

I don’t want a nothing

But YOU!

    

Yes! He made it. He made me. My identity. He is here today holding me. I haven’t lost him. He had known the key to my success door and had made it out of himself. Tears flowing down my cheeks, I groaned. It isn’t the same I had shed all these day. It is the one that is gonna wash away all my fears and glooms.

“Anu”, the words are like rain on parched land. Like the drug of the wound. My own name is new to me. It had never sounded more mellifluous all my life. I wanted to hear it again and again like the chant of a mantra.

“Love confessed”, I read the title of my book into his chest with a smile staining my tears. His lips on my head.