When you are infinitely waiting, time loses its significance.
"When I was fifteen and you thirty, and your toes ran up my shin, you could control my heartbeat. You could make it go faster, and my mind race through smooth, reflecting corridors at breakneck speeds. You controlled me. You controlled the rush of blood to various points, you controlled how frequently I had to go relieve myself of my bursting-at-the-seams libido. That particular act by you, running your toes up my leg under the table (something they casually refer to as a footsie today) was enough to make me want to marry you, proclaim my lifelong love for you, and make love to your utterly white legs in the bright neon light. To your legs because then I probably didn't know what lay between them. I mustered up the courage and ran my hand up your legs one day after bath. You seemed to enjoy the journey as my palm caressed its way up to a crucial point and then suddenly held my hand. It was like holding up the red flag to an already delayed train. It was lust, you were convinced despite my all-out attempts to make you believe otherwise. To me it was love and I had already waited long enough."
At fifteen
…
Life brought your toes up my shin
Like the message in a bottle came to the shore
When I ran myself up your lane, though
Was it time for you to reason or run?
"And then, the permutations of age brought me to twenty-six and you became twenty-three or so. It was still you though, this time thrown in together with me at a crucial juncture of our lives. Traveling salesmen don't have it easy, and as we rode my scooter from one client to another in the summer, it was just us clutching on to each other for comfort. If my sales dwindled one month, you covered up for me, and I did the same for you. You were way smarter, just like you were ten years back and I happily became your sidekick. We traded clients, covered up for each other but nobody minded as long as the sales figures didn't go down. I knew I couldn't live without you but couldn't tell you so. You told me ten years later. Ten years too late, don't you think? And why? Your black Peshawar eyes still dance my blues away."
A button-less shirt that can hardly cover a bust, I wanted so you don't see the tears
Your voice through electricity, comes crackling,
I miss you, so do I, but what can I say?
Today definitely is not our day.
"I silently listened to your stories. The age gap had somehow been moving like an undecided scale. Now you were perhaps ten years younger, or more. I felt older, wiser. Wisdom can get you there, you know? If you weren't a teenager with a perpetual blood rush, you could still get it. The attention, I mean, and there you were, longing in your eyes, coming straight at me, making me feel heady, young, ready to hit the treadmill. You needed my advice, counseling you to cope with your trauma, holding my hand and keeping it on your chest to listen to your heartbeat. It had gone slow, with pain. I felt pain with you, silently listened to your stories. Coffee, ice-cream, known and unknown streets, your hand in mine, my grip on life silently slipping away.
It was my turn to talk one day. You kept your phone away."
I was here, promised to be
For a longish period of time,
But then giving has its day.
The road takes a U-turn, eventually
"But the map said another way?"
Maps have given way to GPS, dude, maps have given way to GPS long back only you didn't know about it. How will you? Stuck in your love stories, unfinished, you hardly had the time to catch up.
"And today, your hand on my lap is warm and inviting. It has a language of its own. You like reading me, you say, but then I hardly write. You like the way my mind works, but the only inlet you have is this blog, so that's hardly representative. It is trash, didn't I say? Your hand finds its way to my heart. It hasn't stopped yet. It has raced with you, slowed down with your pain, sobbed uncontrollably with your departure, and has slowed down for me now. Keep it there for a while as I pick up my pieces from the virtual world. Scattered also has a pattern, someone said."
As I walk in a trance,
a million pieces of light dance on the floor
would have called it a disco
had they not been showing me the way
around my life.
