Friday, February 12, 2010

Lazy Fridays

David Gray's "Kathleen" is a beautiful, beautiful song.

Monday, February 08, 2010

"It's about someone who's gonna save you from yourself."

"A feeling of unreality always overcomes me when I think about how close I was that afternoon."

"You promised you'd tell me."

"Yes, well, everyone knows we'd been to the brink and back again. But we'd still managed to look out for each other when we'd broken down, perhaps because we had no option.

But there I was and I couldn't help it. Memories came flooding back--that endless afternoon at Nirula's, the Benetton sweater shopping with her friends, wiping the coffee smudges off her lips at Barista, that hug in the dark in the car shed.

As we posed for a series of hilarious, self-deprecating cellphone photos in the IIT-Delhi corridors, she laid her head on my left shoulder. As her hair streaked across my face and as she stroked my neck with her right hand, I couldn't help feeling that I'd made the biggest mistake of my life. I wish I'd just been brave enough to call her that night and tell her I wasn't going to let two thousand kilometres come in the way of letting the most perfect girl I'd ever met know that there was no one quite as special as her."

"So what happened then?"

"Her friend said something about how cute we looked together. I remember we got up to leave. Three steps later, she leaned into me and I instinctively wrapped my left arm around her shoulder. Her friend drifted off somewhere and I looked at my cellphone and realised we still had seven minutes till the teams came in.

We sat down on the steps leading up to the auditorium. I looked at her sitting half a step below me to my left. She looked back and arched her eyebrows upwards, which was her patented way of asking 'what now?'

I shrugged my shoulders and asked her how much time we had.

'Five minutes and...', she started.

'...twenty-six seconds,' I completed. 'We synchronised our stopwatches when the topics were released', I smiled.

'Achaa, I think I have to go now,' she said.

'Okay,' I said, as she got up to leave, 'all the best!'

'We'll meet here after the round?' she asked, sitting back down.

'Cool,' I said. 'Aren't you going to...', I began, before she pulled her right hand around my neck again and kissed me on the cheek.

I closed my eyes and took a moment to take it all in. I opened my eyes and she arched her eyebrows at me again.

I couldn't believe it. After everything that had happened the previous winter, she'd been a big enough person to say thank you. It was, up to that point, the closest I'd ever felt to her. Actually, it was the most special I'd ever felt in my life."

"And reality hit you..."

"Three nights later, when she was in the middle of telling me about her day and I knew that I'd never be that high ever again."

"Wow."

"Thankfully, I was wrong."

I'm not sure if there's a point to this story but I'm going to tell it again.

My photo
India
I've been wilfully caught up in the self-defeating quest to get to know myself for years. I've never expected anything beneficial to result from such a quest. I tend to evoke extremely polarised reactions from people I get to know in passing. Consequently, only those people who know me inside-out would honestly claim that I'm a person who's just "alright." It's not a coincidence that the description I've laid out above has no fewer than, title included, eleven references to me (make that twelve). I'm affectionately referred to as "Ego." I think that last statement might have given away a tad too much. Welcome Aboard.

IHTRTRS ke pichle episode mein aapne dekha...

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