Friday, January 31, 2014

The Conversation

'In love?' She repeated his words.
He nodded while looking at her, trying to assess her frame of mind.
'...I don't know…' she said in a frail voice, conscious of his gaze on her. She took a deep breath and propped herself up to sit straight and face him in the eye now.

‘I don’t understand it…the term – love...I mean, how does one know that it is love and not a fleeting case of infatuation?  It is strong, very strong whatever that I feel for you but, ‘love’...I don’t know…it might just fade tomorrow, you never know…how can it be love then…..’ she again almost lost her voice while saying that. Choked, she was.

It took all her strength to keep her voice from quivering and speaking again
‘…I was supposedly in love earlier also but…one morning I got up and it was all over for me…it was most definitely love but then, how could it possibly die out so abruptly…but it did…just like that…It wasn’t supposed to happen that way you know…'

His gaze on her intensified as he tried to read between the lines.
She looked away from his boring eyes and went on again 'It’s a fact, you are on my mind 24x7…there is not even a single second in the day that I don’t think about you…I don’t know how, when, in which moment I allowed you to ingrain so deeply in my being that now, you’ve become the nucleus of my existence…uninvited, unconsciously and unintentionally…its…its just…you know - too much, too soon…’

The irritation in her voice was just too apparent, she didn’t like whatever she was speaking. ‘I look for you in others…hear your name in others names…match their facial features with you…the bits of habits, personalities that reflect you….its like trying hard to solve a jigsaw puzzle...matching, framing, arranging, rearranging and then never getting it right…..’

She looked at him helplessly.
‘I feel like a slave for having my moods sway to the way you treat me…....you’ve rendered me useless! And I don’t like it…I just don’t like this dependency…this, this sense of losing myself in you….’
He was hearing her patiently.

‘For the short span of time that I’ve known you, the intensity of this height is odd…very, very odd... and it can definitely not be ‘love’..! It is not.’
She said firmly with a hint of rationality in her voice.

He nodded, the air had cleared for him.