Love Is Not Skin Deep

She was going to meet her pen friend turned lover for the first time. Her heart which had longed like a thirsty traveller for his words now fluttered with anxiety at the prospect of meeting him in person.

Would their outer appearance hold more value than their inner worlds which they had shared with bare honesty?

The evening sky was a pale orange with dashes of dark clouds adorning it. Sitting in the park bench, she looked at the children playing with unblemished joy. She wished she could time travel to an age when her desires would not be measured against her perceived worth. Why should the validity of our desires always be weighed against our worth? And who decides the worth of the soul in a world which is blind to everything that has soul?

Looking at the spent faces of the people returning home from work, she wondered if he had lost the will to meet her because life had pulled him in other directions.

Picking up a dried leaf from the ground, she knew that everything that they had shared in this brief time held more than a lifetime of unadulterated happiness.

She had let herself be vulnerable with him. While she had told him about the first time she had let her heart be mishandled, he had told her about the first time he had hid his heart from fear of being misunderstood. While he had told her about the flaws of the corporate world he worked in, she told him about the beauty that broken birds had. While She adored the logic he used in painting his world, he seemed to love how she placed logic outside her door while she danced to the tune of her own heart.

Through smudged ink blots and torn sheets of paper alone,they had bonded. Through words and words alone they had traversed the vast corners and edges and plains of each others world.

It wasn't the broad expanse of his chest that had mesmerized her but the way his chest held his heart with such loyalty even when it had to answer life's tough questions. It wasn't the dimple on her cheeks which had made his heart beat faster but it was the way she let life remake her heart every time it broke her.

In short, their love was blind. Blind to physicality. And open to their changing inner realm alone. It was this that made this meeting hold a very special meaning to her. She needed to know if love would sustain the flaws of the real world in all its brutal beauty?

To build a world of love with dreamy confessions and hopes is one thing but to keep such a love alive in the real world, despite the changing nature of our body and heart and conditions is another.

Slowly with calculated steps, a man made his way towards her. In his hand he seemed to be holding a leather diary. His hair was disheveled but his eyes were deep. Oh his eyes. They seemed to have a story of their own. If only she could drown in them and never be retrieved. While she was lost in his eyes, he had walked upto her and was standing in front of the bench she was seated on.

Before she could say anything, he picked up the dried leaf that she had unconsciously picked up earlier. Holding it his palm he smiled at her.

It was then that She knew that their letter hadn't been a bunch of carefully woven fantasies.

It was real.

As real as the man with deep eyes who had now seated himself beside her.

He held out his hand in a manner of greeting and while she hesitated he laughed.

"Don't worry!. . . I am not here to steal your heart or anything even if I hope to do so one day soon", he replied.

She was stunned at his audacity. She let him hold her palm a minute longer than she would have otherwise done. The sense of safety her agitated heart felt in his presence surprised her. While she had earlier thought that the reality of his presence would create boundaries and gaps, it somehow seemed to pull her closer.

He held out the brown diary to her. On top of each page of the diary he had written all of her wishes. "I hope you get to fulfill all your desires and I hope this diary stands as a testimony to your accomplishments. "

Taking the blue pen from his shirt pocket without any sense of formality, she penned down his name next to hers on the first page of the diary.

"Let us do it all together, life is more beautiful when I get to witness its wonders with a fellow traveller like you", she said

Love is reborn in newer ways every day.