Memories to live for

"I wonder, if we were nocturnal would we feel more connected to those far away stars, perhaps sensing the fragility of earth all the more? I have always felt that this is closer to the truth of who we are."

"Are we closer to the truth of who we are or are we closer of be vulnerable? As much this time is intimate as it is laden with fear - fear that what if this moment is only a beautiful fantasy when time stood still and does not hold in thaw of time."

"This is real. Do not try and possess the moment or fear that it won't last. Our moments have always existed and will always exist, for us and within us, if not again between us. Moment is when we loose ourselves in it - when it is made sacred for just the two human beings who exist in them."

"The reality is not pristine and that's why I do not want to look up to the reality. Because if I look up, I may find myself at the mercy of questioning eyes, pleading, begging to know what am I doing. And I am not at liberty to say because I simply do not know why I fall for you."

"Explanations are futile and reasons are earthly. Every night I go to bed seeking answer to what if tomorrow I meet someone who do not have fear of loosing and knows how to melt beyond the mundane reality. And I wondered would that be a safe harbor to live in? What if I spend my whole life waiting to be held within him? I have never wanted any form of eternity until I discovered you."

"The moments we share are not real, our conversations are no more taking birth out of experiencing the natural moments. We have moved on from our initial feelings. I wish we could wind back the hands of time and return there."

"The day I acknowledged you, I didn't sleep that entire night and kept thinking is this real? I time traveled in past looking for the answer and I found myself. None of us are in possession of our feelings, it is ephemeral but thoughts beneath are perennial as it is embodied in memories that build one. And as long as we belong to our thoughts, space and time will not matter for it will be boundless, eternal."

"Have you heard about persuasion? My revelation of my feelings are my persuasion to get you to know who I am. I don't want to spend my life in the daily dread of a day when we find that only the strands of nostalgia is keeping us together but we are actually far apart."

"We never belonged to one another for love has no possession. Neither we were two halves, for our love made us whole. Yet your love was my salvation and I believe mine was yours. And it healed me granting the strength for me to be, who I was born to be. But your blemishes in our existence of today with tomorrow's nightmares both astound and haunt me in times when I am all by myself. This is an enigma as I feel an unthinkable desire to surrender."

He asked me - "This is incredible, you remember everything she wrote to you in all these years. Why do you then want those writings back from her?"

I said - "She never wrote anything. She just rested her head on my shoulders during our time together and kept speaking. But she always wanted a blissful evocation of time we spent together and I gave words to her. They are not hers and she is capable to live the life she has got. And for me they are memories which would never fade away with time and will resonate like her giggles that are more delicate than wind-chimes and just as chaotic, just as melodic."

The Secret Within

As I was preparing to go to bed that night and switched off the light, I saw a quick flicker and a crackle of light on the terrace of the house on the opposite side of the street. The darkness around that place was punctuated with small glimmers of light from a glass jar that softly buzzed through the blackened air - they were fireflies. I was enchanted, and imagined to have discovered a hideaway of a great magician at the middle of the night.

The next morning, I found an envelop inside the letter box mounted at the gate of my house - it was a white envelop with nothing written on it. Inside it was a piece of white paper as blank as the envelop. I was baffled and scared at the same time and for that entire day and next couple of days, it preoccupied my thoughts frequently trying to decipher who, why and what. With butterflies in my stomach and my head buzzing with random possibilities, an icy discomfort blossomed in and inflated my breaths. And a few days later, just when my breaths began to show signs of deflation, I received them again in my letterbox.

This time, in rage more than being fearful, I turned into an insomniac for the next couple of nights and stood near the window determined to solve the mystery. There were no sparkle of fireflies in those nights and in absence of it, the night appeared to be a spaceless prison. There was nothing in my letter box in the following mornings. On the third night when I battled to be an insomniac and struggled to carry the weight of my eyelashes, at around 01:30 AM, I saw a lady coming out from the gate of the same house whose terrace kindled with fireflies earlier and dropped something at the letter box of my house. I had frozen for a moment and my thoughts paralyzed. As I regained consciousness, I rushed for it and found, inside the letter box, the same white envelop with a blank white piece of paper inside. I came back to my room and saw that the terrace of the house kindled with the sparkle of fireflies.

As I met that lady and talked about it, she spoke - "My universe began and ended with him. I could have ran forever, searched forever, but in the end, every path led right back to his heart and soul. When I saw him, it was as if space and time became the finest point imaginable, as if time collapsed into one tiny speck and exploded at light speed. We were the protectors of one another, confidants and true friends. The trust we gave to each other, is what kept us safe in this world, in this life. But weeks before he left this place, we had a fierce fight and we stopped talking to each other. However we had an unspoken agreement between us - whenever we stopped talking to each other out of a fight, either of us, whose heart melted away first, would drop a blank white piece of paper inside a blank white envelop to other's letter box. The blank piece of paper was used to scribble the anger and then drop to other's letter box.

"The last fight didn't melt either of our hearts. I peeped into my letter box as the first thing every morning and at nights a lingering haze of sleep sat somewhere at the back of my mind but too far away to reach, floating somewhere in a pool of thousand anticipations. On one evening, the blue porch light didn't lit and I discovered that the entire house was submerged into a deep darkness. And it was only on one of the night last week, when I was on my terrace that I saw light in the house. I thought he came back but since the porch was still not blue in the evenings, I kept melting away my heart."

Over the time she spoke candidly about her relationship with the earlier resident of the house in which I was living. The more she talked, the more she sounded a disillusioned person who kept oscillating between two time warps - one was the nostalgia for her relation and the other was the search of answers for her thoughts.

Once when I went to her place, I discovered jars of dead fireflies and a few write-ups in one of the chest of drawer in her living room writen by someone else. I used to read them whenever I visited her place.

"On the nights when the moon is full, it's light is a diffuse ocean above you that lessened your inkiness and in the distance I am a frozen silhouette from an unseen ballet of love,  against the deep velvety sky. On the nights that are dark, you are a frozen firework explosion on this earth when I look at you through a heady swarm of green light and I am a lunacy in the dying embers, somewhere at an unknown corner of the earth, enlivened by the sprinkles of allure and pearly hues of love."

Each of her write-ups portrayed her feelings as someone who stays in a hideaway and only expresses herself in the hour when no one watches and listens to this earth. She perceived him in as many shades as her thoughts could sketch and imagined herself as an emotion of an endless wait lying somewhere unknown to the world. She built up a soliloquy of her connect with him around all these and discovered it as unrequited. She expressed a deep sense of satisfaction in being the solitary dreamer of the relationship and wished to stay it the same forever. She described herself being in a space where she breathed in comfort and felt a tranquility in her nerves.

She said that she found these write-ups on her terrace, kept under a stone, when she shifted to this place and found them so mesmerizing that she kept them with her and read them when she felt like.

I didn't quiet believe her as those papers didn't show signs of ageing. Although she claimed to be staying alone in the house yet her place gave me a creepy sensation of presence of another someone hiding at some corner of the house, another shadow lurking around somewhere.

On one of the days she was at my place and we were sitting in my patio at the dusk sipping Darjeeling tea. She finished her last sip, kept down the cup on the table and drifted her eyes to the molten, fiery orange horizon. She then looked at me and said - "I never had any relationship with any of the previous resident of this house, neither I have any past behind those blank envelops and papers I sent to you. The only truth in my story was my longing of the sight of the blue porch light of this house - it was my abstract companion of solitude.

"I return late from work. On my way to home every street I pass through is lit with warm orange glow and every house that I look at has it's entrance in darkness. This house was no different until one evening I found it's porch lit with blue color - that evening I kept looking at it for few minutes without blinking. The next evening I looked at it and smiled. And since then every evening I stopped before entering my house to look at this blue porch, blink a few times and smile. 

"You became a habit - one to which I was drawn to in oblivion. There was something about you and I that matched, each half loving the other so fully that a life alone was meaningless. You were a welcome change in my otherwise mundane life. But one evening when I didn't find you, my heart sank into darkness but I had not let the spark of hope become extinguished; I knew you were out there somewhere because someone as good as you just don't disappear. Every evening I stopped at my gate longer than earlier and on nights I was on my terrace counting every moment looking at the empty dark space with the hope that the next moment you would miraculously appear there from nowhere. But I started missing you and eventually missing you also became a habit as was seeing you every evening. You became a silhouette, as if you walked away from a photograph and left behind a blackness."

She stopped with expression on her face of someone waking up from a monologue and appeared a little embarrassed. She cleared her throat and resumed in conscious way - "I was ecstatic when I saw light in this house and from thereon I started counting days thinking it will just be a matter of day when you will start switching on the porch light daily evening. But seeing it's not happening, I wanted to meet the new resident of the house this time that I did not earlier. Dropping those blank pages inside blank envelops in your letter box and the story behind it were nothing more than an attempt of a beautiful mind to meet you."

I was so engrossed in listening to her that I heaved a sigh after she finished feeling that I didn't breath since ages. When I asked her about the fireflies, she appeared to be in fear and surprise. She seemed hesitant to talk on it but finally said - "I sought solace in the warm glow of fireflies -  they were a secret bundle of joy on the nights when I felt tired of waiting."

After she left my place, I decided to return her envelopes and papers and also a jar of fireflies that I stole from her place. At around 01:00 AM that night, I went to her place and found the door of her house open. As I entered inside, I saw her lying on the floor in a pool of blood trickling down her throat - even under the illumination of thousand fireflies it glinted red turning the room into a dip of neon scarlet. In front of me, on a couch at a distance, sat a lady looking the blood dripping from her hands with utmost serenity as if absorbed in examining it carefully and completely unaware of her surroundings.

Under the glimmer of fireflies, when I saw her I was baffled and terrified to find she resembled exactly her as if she was a clone of her with charcoal black complexion, deepest ebony skin and her eyes dazzling with the feeling of the fatality. The adrenaline flew over my veins like a carp through the river, but I couldn’t move a single muscle, not even to scream. The absolute horror completely paralyzed me and the more I thought about running away or simply moving a bit, the more I felt discouraged and utterly terrified.

But upon discovering my presence, she ran away from there in a flash. And only after she disappeared that I could gather myself up and found a note on the table, written by the same person who wrote the ones that I found in one of the chest of drawer at her place -

"I have known you since the time you started missing him. I still remember your words - 'In him I found someone whose waits for me to reach home and staying awake on those nights when I am sleepless were so pristine. A distinct attachment unfolded for him.' As I knew you more, I realized that you didn't miss him, you missed yourself to be in that space where your reality was shaped by the imagination of your wishes. I savored accompanying you on the terrace at nights to listen to his reminiscences in your talks and grew fond of them - they were like turning the pages of a memoir of an unrequited love.

"I don't remember now when was the first time I went to the terrace at night without you - on the night I kept looking at the darkness and emptiness that time had left at the place where you found him; I loved it like the ancients loved the night sky. Gradually the escapades became a habit and I began to endear them like nascent leaves of spring love warmth. An attachment for the incompleteness unfolded in me and I discovered a world of my own, beyond the shadow of yours, where I began to live the memoir in which the darkness became my beloved and it's grandeur was something I fell for. And one night when I saw him surrounded by a swarm of specks of green lights, I perceived his grandeur in a new shade and captivated me more than the sight of the winter sun above the pristine snow capped mountain. I trapped fireflies in jars so that I could watch him through it whenever the usual he become mundane.

"He evolved into a habit for me - I wanted to hold on to every bit of my connect with him forever, wished I could just stop moving forward and exist in that moment with him, not thinking, not breathing, just not apart. And you became a secret listener of my expressions beneath. But everything fell apart and broken into a million shards the night the house was lit. And when I discovered your pursuit, all my world collapsed in that moment - what I once treasured became memories at once and a shadow lingered in the depths of my mind. It was the extinguishing of a dream, of a way of life.

"Since that day my eyes cast a mournful gaze to his disappearance and beheld a frozen fury for you. We will be forever yet finite within each span - each incarnation with only so many days to bask in my love. Perhaps we have had our run this time, may be not - it could be just a siesta with a warm afternoon just ahead.

"He will always both far and eternal and you are now near and forgiven ! I could not make yours but may my last moments be peaceful wrapped in my love !"

Sins of mood
 

"At night when I looked through the window, outside in the middle of the darkness under the pale amber glow of the street light I saw a girl standing and watching me persistently. It was not scary but it made that moment feel trapped in a labyrinth of thoughtlessness. And the next moment made me feel that her perusal might be of the painting hung on the opposite wall, illuminated by a faint blue gleam from a light placed over it. I reached out to switch off the light and when I turned back and looked outside, I found her no where outside. Her sudden disappearance made the remainder of my night sleepless and sink, through infinite layers of bizarre explanations about her sudden appearance, down to an abyss where I saw her again with her gaze fixed at me. This time it scared and angered me at the same time in search of answer for why me on this earth.

"With time, the moments of thoughtlessness have gone; I no more switch off the light above the painting also because one night I found that she didn't disappeared even after putting it off. The time has also melted away the infinite layers of thoughts like the way the warmth of whiskey melts the ice. What stayed, along with sleeplessness, is the sink down to abyss through layers of fear and anger but in same pursuit. Perhaps the anger might have turned into a slight perturbation."

"For how long you are experiencing this?"

"It's been six months."

"How often do you experience this?"

"It only happens during night but not every night. There's also no pattern to it, it's random more like an attack. Many nights pass by when I look outside my window and I cannot see her; and a breeze of nostalgia touch me and go making my inside simmer with an uncanny dis-quietness out of a longing for her gaze. But when I see her, I spend the nights thereafter in sleeplessness; even if I close my eyelids and try to sleep, her gaze obtrudes in the space of my existence without answering the question why me on this earth."

"Do you still feel her stare here, right now?"

"No because I haven't seen her recently. But when it happens, it makes my days almost unnerving as I feel she's staring at me in everything I look up to and whomsoever I interact with."

"Didn't you try to go out and search her? May be somebody is actually out there keeping a watch on you out of a sinister motive."

"I went out a few times to see her, walked a few steps also across the streets to search her but every time I found myself to be the only soul in the desolate streets; I could not find any faint sinister silhouette of other solitary individuals also in the distant gleam of street lights. I am sure it's illusory, probably a mental manifestation of something."

"Scopophobia - that's what we call it. Scopophobia is the fear of being stared at. It varies in severity from person to person. Some people are afraid only when a stranger stares for a long period of time, while others fear even passing eye contact with a friend. But you seem to exhibit only partial symptoms of it - may be you are in a very early state. I am prescribing you an anti-depressant and a sleeping pill but use the sleeping pill only as an SOS. Try to talk to some one you trust, someone with whom you think you can share this; it will help you to gradually to come out of this phenomenon."

I was remembering the conversation, between me and the psychiatrist whom I visited the previous day on a Saturday evening, over the sips of Malabar coffee in a room that was lit faintly from the wall fitting but overwhelmingly from the log-fire of the fireplace whose light danced over the walls and white curtains draped over the windows, amber and glowing accompanied by the crackling and popping as oak logs were slowly melting away to ash. Last night was a sleepless one and a repeat of the phenomenon which I was going through for the past six months. And it brought with it a ferocious stillness around me in which I could feel the tick of every moment pulsating against my breath. But somewhere in that ferocity, time sedately poured an inkiness over every horizon to give me the realization of helplessness of human beings in front of time and push me into a contemplative zone about one's freedom on this earth whether it's an illusion of senses or a fragile object at the behest of time. As the beams of log fire turned into embers, I no longer lit them up and was contended to bask under the dim illumination than the dazzling glares - be it of humans in my mind or of inanimate objects in front of me. The things with which I carried on were the countless cups of Malabar coffee and the hazy view of outside from behind the milky white curtains of the window. The cycle of sleepless nights made every evening appear as an expansive assemblage of such million little impressions that blurred the lines between perception and reality and receded only the next evening of the night when I finally slept.

Five years back, on a mundane evening, we realized that it's been three years that we could not confess our affinity for each other - neither to our ourselves nor to each other. By that time we had been knowing each other for 2 years and together we laughed, roamed, talked, drunk and felt good, touched each other consciously. In all these, we remained, thoughtful of seeking from and apprehensive of asking to, both ourselves and each other whether we are in a state of connection, an intimate one or not. And by then we read the line "love doesn't need a day to happen, it can happen on any day" on many places and trusted it. On that evening, she uttered these lines and went silent. In that moment of silence, we confessed our smiles, exchanged shy glances and gave a warm hug to each other with closed eyes.

Since the time I had known her, she was a gregarious person who was always in euphoric spirits and someone who was very fond of observance. She always enjoyed observing people around her, places she visited or things she watched. She had an affinity to be a nocturnal being but not out of a longing for serenity or to be imaginative to plumb into the night but to carry out anything in which she found pleasure without any distractions or disturbances. I had never known her a socially withdrawn person - she always got along, with her acquaintances and friends, with an exuberance and a high degree of cheerfulness that, too many, might have appeared a fake outlook. But beyond all these vivaciousness, she was a girl who was a seeker of meaning in the routine existence and purpose in her connects with people; she always needed a reason, a point to talk to meet people, visit places or to be a part of gatherings. Attributed to this side of her persona that both she and her friends were selective enough for any of their gatherings - the former in attending and latter in inviting. But the most unfamiliar side of her that I had often discovered was her getting preoccupied and in the process getting cut off from her surroundings - perhaps it was a moment when she pursued purpose of her connect with me.

Over one of the evening talks she asked - "If, on someday, we wake up to find that we lost our memories and forgot everything we had between us, how would we start again?"

I replied - "On some night, I would stop to find you at an unknown cross road, staring at the endless roads on both sides. The lazy blinking of your eye lids would suggest you are in no hurry to return back even when the clock had past midnight. I would breath secretly to hide my presence. In sometime you would start walking and I would walk behind you and we would be the only two souls on the desolate streets that would be lit by the smudgy illumination of street lamps. All the streets I would pass through following you would be unknown to me - they would be streets with chalets on both sides hidden behind tamarisk trees; every chalet would be having lanterns hung at it's entrances housing buff yellow colored flames as if everyone housed a slice of moon inside a glass jar at their doorstep. Finally I would reach to the street where I myself reside and you would be opening the gates of your house that is rightly opposite to mine on the other side of the street. I would be surprised by this that I had not known you or seen you when you stay right in front of me. Behind a tree, I would wait for you to disappear inside your house. From there onward, I would somehow reach that unknown cross road every night and follow you through those streets to your home. While walking to follow you, I would weave, inside me, a moment in which we would hold each other's hands, sit under one of the lanterns and quaff the endlessness of the road. And back at my home, lying down on the bed I would close my eyes and wish hard to see ourselves, in a dream, walking together on the same endless road. One night at the same cross road I would appear in front of you that would appear mysterious to you, bend on my knees and offer you a bunch of scarlet colored tulips. You would sigh, give a gentle smile that would appear to have been borrowed from famous Mona Lisa portrait and accept them."

She grew slightly restless in listening me towards the end. She then replied - "Isn't it only a whim of that moment? Because you put me in that moment, you think you fell in love with me whereas you actually fell in love with that moment. If you would have met me in the hustles of the city amidst the tall skyscrapers and mundane life, would you have still fallen in love with me ?"

I felt slightly irritated but somehow managed to calm myself down and replied - "May be you are right but life is made up of whims captured by moments. In the hustles of the city, time might have triggered some other whims and woven some other moments to fall in love we would never know."

"So there's something whimsical about love but whims are short lived and some day they burn out. Wouldn't you on that day secretly wish to run away from love and a sense of incompleteness or loneliness grip you?"

"There's something human about love. Somewhere between the ferocity of whims and secret wishes to run away that the love starts building infinite layers of thoughts in the human mind - perhaps each one haunted by a sense of incompleteness. And not a long walk we take on those sands that we realize we are in a maze of solitude and loneliness. It is trapped in this hourglass that we discover the humanity of love - it is nothing but only a reflection of ourselves."

A brief silence prevailed between both of us.

She replied in a voice that sounded deeply tiring one - "But you stalked me."

I didn't know what to reply her and neither I was interested enough to figure out an explanation of that. Instead I chose to ask her - "How would you start things all over again?"

She said - "I would discover you more - your idea of love, the extent of my existence in your solitary moments, with whom you connect on this earth beyond me. There would not be any unknown place in my timelines, only unknown you.

Most of our times were spent like this talking to each other either staying back at home or over the dinner table at any restaurant. We never used to spend time listening to silence of surroundings or sounds of nature for which I yearned but she found it a sheer boredom. Over the years an intense curiosity grew inside us to take a glance at those spaces of each other with which we were unfamiliar with. It was not a result of suspicion towards or possessiveness for each other - we showed no signs ever of these things. I think it was a result of spending time in talks at our every meet - it acted like a narcotic for our desires.

On few occasions when she came over to my place to spend the evening, she stayed back for the night and returned the next morning. A typical time when she came over was endless talks with each other interspersed with brief silences or slurps of coffee followed by dinner and retiring to bed, though sleep came by at different times to both of us.

On one such night, I woke up to find she was not beside me on the bed. The only explanation that my mind sought of not finding her at that time was why did she left my place at the middle of the night. But then I decided to look around in the house and I discovered an oblique beam of light from a room. When I peeped into the room from it's half open door, I saw her sitting on the chair and placing a diary on the study desk, she was writing on. I didn't want to disturb the trail of her thoughts; hence I returned back to bed with the wish of talking with her on this the next day but my curiosity kept ticking the hands of the time and I kept thinking of what she might be writing - was she revisiting the moments of our relationship or was she pouring out her heart which might be upset of something or had she found a way to be in solace by being in solitude than being with me. I fell asleep with such thoughts wandering in my mind and woke up again to find her beside me in deep sleep. I couldn't wait for the next day and walked into the room to reach; the diary was open with a pen on it's middle and a piece written on it's right hand page -

"Lot of times I sit back to think what is it that connects me to you and you know what I find - it is the fear of a life in which your mundane presence is absent. Yes your presence is mundane, repetitive that turned into an endearing habit. There would not be days any more where I would be hearing my name in your voice - it's a moment where everything in this world converges into a deep sense of fulfillment and explodes into a delight. There would not be days where I would discover the let it go moment when you surrender in an argument - every time you fall silent in an argument and say nothing further with a smile, I could clearly read the line 'because I love you, I lose the argument but win you' hidden at the corner of your smile. There is so much of silence around you and the things are so restless around me - either I have to slip and fall in your embrace to breath in little of it or you have to slip and fall in my embrace to breath in a little serenity in me."

I looked at the night's darkness and in that moment when the stillness around seemed almost audible I felt myself in the middle of an unusual helplessness. Few half whispers, half sounds from unknown corners of the earth from the measureless depths of air of that night added a sort of richness to the words of that writing and made me cross over to another world carrying an arcane question - "Why do we seek love so much in our lives when we know one day it will get burned away with the flames our pyre?"

Since that day, something changed between us - time, connect, feelings - I don't know what. And since that day she lived in two time warps - one was perusal of our relationship through hypothetical frames and the other was the maudlinism of our relation. And I felt her life turning a porous one permeable to the arrivals and departures of me.

And since then on, getting a glimpse of her through the half open door and, later, reading her diary pages became an obsessive temptation. An unconscious incitement constantly lurked inside me until I glanced through that half open door and found her writing in her diary in-spite of being aware that sometime at night she may walk into that room. An impatience irritated me till I take up her diary in my hands and read the pages. A layer of pretense and wariness began to enfold in the part of my life that was associated with her and the intense curiosity had started to brim - on the nights she stayed back at my place, I laid down on the bed beside her, closed my eyes and turned motionless to give her an impression of me in deep sleep and when she disappeared into that room, I walked towards the door but with extreme cautiousness so that she remains unaware of my presence.

Whenever she was at my place, I always looked for a chance to reach for her vanity bag and search her diary to see if she filled up any new pages since my previous read. And whenever I went over to her place to spend the evenings and she got up, amidst our talks, to perform any chore I took a stroll through her house in search of anything that may reveal something about her that was unknown to me, some part of life that she might be hiding or something I had missed about her. Unable to find anything of that sort I got transformed into a resigned mood and eventually denied her request to stay back the night.

Strangely she filled the pages of her diary only when she stayed back at my place. Her writings appeared to reveal murmured longings of the wishes of her heart and reflected to seek a timeless refuge in me. Each time, she appeared to create a mood piece kindled by a satin flame of love that was warm enough to let her sleep when she retired to bed after dropping the pen.

"How do you spend your evenings and nights when I don't visit you?"

On a day and at the time when the beautiful cock-tail blue shade of the sky began to darken into gravel-grey and large pillows of cloud were getting formed by blotting out the old-gold color of the sun, she posed this odd question to me.

I replied - "Why are you asking this?"

She said with a voice that resonated a smile - "I want to know if you miss me or not." And the smile came to her lips also by the time she finished saying it.

"As spending time with you became a habit over the time, spending time without you also became a habit but there's difference - when I am with you, time just flows and I never realize a thing called clock also exists on this earth but when I am not with you, the clock starts to tick."

She appeared thoughtful for few seconds and replied - "You know how's it for me? The day I don't meet you there seems to be something missing from my timeline, there's something that's betiding without me being aware of, there's a restlessness that keeps simmering for not finding you in front of my eyes. I fall and stay in the grip of a sombre inertia till the time I meet you the next time. I cannot describe it in words how's it when I am not with you."

Rain had started falling in crazy chaotic drops, the gusting wind was carrying them in wild vortices one moment and in diagonal sheets the next. The sound of rain that day drowned out even the sound of silence between us, l felt an intense anxiety in that rain.

What she couldn't describe that day was indeed indescribable but not incomprehensible and I think we both comprehended well what it was.

When she came on the evening next to the night when I first experienced the phenomenon of watching a girl outside at night, she found me de-spirited; I was perplexed and in dread of the previous night's experience.

"Are you sure she was someone real whom you saw?" She asked when I told her about it.

"I am not sure, I don't know if she was real or not." I replied.

She hugged me in the warmth of her embrace and with a low voice, to assure me, said - "Don't worry, it's just a temporary hallucination that will go away. You don't have to think much of it, just close your eyes and sleep off at night."

It didn't go away, only the scare lessened but I lived in the daily dread of it. I experienced it only on the nights when she didn't stay overnight at my place, it lead me to believe on her words that it could a temporary hallucination perhaps caused by an obsession of her presence during her absence. It affected our relationship - she on one hand, for the first time I felt, began to treat me wondrously where her talks seemed to echo the same pacification that she sought in her filling up her diary pages and I, on the other hand, had half of my mind engrossed in getting over the sight of that girl and other half pre-occupied in those usual temptations towards her.

We had this conversation on one of the evenings of those times.

She asked - "Are you being fearful now?"

I asked - "Of what?"

"That you may again experience that bad dream at night?"

"It's no more fearful but it's causing an uneasiness that's sapping even the usual energy of the daily existence. I wonder what could be the genesis of this - did I thought too much about anything or is it a subconscious imagery of the connotation that a relationship of love has got evil eyes as well. I wish I could see her face how she looks like."

"Every time you speak, I wonder how much you think and probably you think so much that's why you see so much. You know when did I fell in love with you in real sense - it's not on that evening when we both confessed, but it's, after then, since the time when I started listening to you during our talks. I grew so fond of the way you crafted your imaginations and thoughts that many times, while listening to you, I wondered how you would admire me if I ever ask you to. But somehow and I don't know for what reason, I could not ask you to admire me; so I started admiring you in an unknown corner of my heart keeping it a private conversation between me and my heart at the time of night when nobody would listen or steal my emotions for you. And today by seeing such a person in distress whom I admired for always being in possession of a grand serenity, to which I too wished to be part on many occasions, I am feeling a love for you that is resolute in restoring that grandeur."

She came up and sat beside, interlocked our tiny fingers and placed my head on her shoulders. I said - "I didn't know you love me so much, so deeply."

She replied in a mellowed reverberation - "One revelation leads to another in this world - I too didn't know your serenity can be fragile."

On that night, she filled up the page of her diary with exactly the same thing she spoke about in the evening.

As she became aware of this phenomenon and it's toll on me, she limited her visits to my place. And I, being unable to bear the toll, decided to finally see a psychiatrist but I had never told her about this lest she grew worrisome.

The anti-depressants did work and started relieving me from the experience - those hallucinations became infrequent, the anxiety and the temptation in the mood, while with her, started to settle down and the uncomfortable sombreness that used to grip the following days of that nightmare started fading away. Even when occasionally I saw her I no longer grew uneasy with her gaze, I no longer struggled to ignore her presence  or get bothered by it. I managed to sleep, although not without difficulty but unlike earlier times when entire night I stayed sleepless but the only thing that couldn't get separated from my thoughts and probably kept me sleepless on few nights, was the curiosity for her diary pages but due to her limited visits I did not get chance to read it.

There's a sense of colossal tranquillity induced in the nerves and I began to feel sighs of relief in my routine existence. When I shared this with her, she resonated an acknowledgement for her belief of thou shall pass and just when I was amused with and quietly absorbing my reincarnation, an apparition surfaced - this time emanating from within my house and more prominent.

I sensed a faint movement of a shadow inside my house one night when I was asleep. There were almost no sound of any footsteps, only sounds of sighs, long and deep, reverberated throughout the house by fading away one moment and becoming more prominent the other, suggestive of someone walking through the house - it was as if someone visited my house without my knowledge. The lazy billowing of curtains brought a fragrance of ladies perfume and it flared up, inside me, the dread of slipping in the grip of another hallucination. And the next moment I suspected the presence of same whom I used to see under the lamp post, outside, in the middle of the night. I looked straight out of the window but I couldn't find her outside that night. I gasped for my breath for few seconds, drank water but couldn't muster courage to take a walk through my house and when I finally could, I went straight into that room where she filled the pages of her diary. I stood there for a long time alternating my watch between the outside darkness through the window and the empty desk top silently missing the reading of her diary. All the pages I read so far flashed through my thoughts one by one that night till my eyes got hit by the light of the dawn.

And on that night I discovered that my Scopophobia didn't go away, the anti depressants didn't work longer. Since she didn't stay back at nights anymore in those days, I felt it's tremor almost every night that brought about the cycle of sleeplessness back in my nights. A scare kept dripping from the night and I felt like a stranger amidst a lifeless exotica and felt stalked by a thousand invisible eyes making me appear myself a prisoner of them. It subsided by itself and when it did, it used to leave me in a world full of helplessness and confusion. But I no longer visited the psychiatrist for this phenomenon with the fear of detecting a serious mental disease in myself but instead I started taking the sleeping pills every night, for the first time since it was prescribed, that helped me sleep well before I could feel or hear anything.

One morning I woke up to find an oblique beam of light from that room and I ran towards it with an anticipation of finding her surprisingly - the door was half open and when I glanced inside, I could only saw a few white pages placed on that study desk. I reached near it and they were pages from her diary on which she wrote this addressing me -

"My Dear ____________,
"It is time to be wise and draw curtains to our relationship because beyond this it will be a life full of hidden sentinels and unspoken suspicions. From today we will be free, not from each other but from the sins of our moods. I wanted to speak to you one last time before we depart - sitting on an evening and hypnotized by smelling the faint fragrance from the burn of pine but instead of that I am letting these few pages from my diary to speak to you.

"Since the day we have confessed our feeling to each other, I believed the existence of love between us to be a reality. I neither felt to be on cloud nine when I fell in love nor I I was struck by any melodramatic or ethereal imaginations, I found myself to be in a space where my inside kept realizing a deep sense of belonging and fulfillment. But I, also, lived in a daily dread of losing you but I didn't know the rationale of that fear which I then accepted as an elusive mystery of my soul. But today when I reflect back, I realize that the fear was not of losing you but of losing my engagement with time - I had an idleness in my time in which I assumed the character of someone and staged dialogues with that person in the form of monologues with myself. The staged dialogues were a pre-occupation with unknowns - unknown perspectives, undisclosed moments or unrevealed facets. That was the reason I had always looked for an engagement in talks between us whenever we met and shied away from the spells of silence - talks kept me assured and relieved of your presence beside me satisfying my microscopic inquisitiveness and silence made me feel I am losing that watch of you and falling in the grip of that idleness. And these sensations became more prominent and formed haunting reflections in my mind in the times when I was not with you.

"This was gradually placing me in a state of disquietude by your absences and on one occasion I set out and waded through the darkness to reach your place but stopped to knock your door because I didn't know how I could explain my cognition to you. I then stood under a street lamp and kept conspiring to get a glimpse of your moments that you spend without me - what do you do, what you hold in your treasured mind, what still remains unknown to me about you. I didn't distrust you but I traced an incompleteness in my understanding of the person in you; I didn't suspect you of hiding something from me but I felt few things may have somehow stayed hidden. All these intrigued me to pursue and perceive the far off, pristine corner in you. It didn't end that night and became my habit to stand under that street lamp at night, quite frequently. On the nights when I stepped out, I had often asked myself, during my walk through the darkness, what will I achieve in that moment, on that day when I will discover the unknown secrets about you and I felt an palpable vacuity immediately but my obsession established my act to be a pertinent one.

"But on the nights when I stayed back, spending time with you in those evenings had a profound effect on me which kept me away from all the illicit contemplation and with you by my side at night, I pursued and perceived a different you - you who was known to my conventional wisdom and whose identity and behavior was confined by my imaginations about love. Those nights were the only time when senses prevailed and all my desires and convictions converged to form thousand ideas of love bathed under which all my lunacies melted.

"I was weighed down by a remorse when you told me about your hallucinations and felt pity of your situation. And when I hugged you, I sunk into a melancholia only to discover a divine moment of pure love, a glimpse into the enlightenment. That day I wanted to wind back the hands of time to the confession of our love to each other, freeze it and never let it thaw. For the first time, I started missing you in my daily existence and my leisure lit a flame of bliss in my inside in which I was happy to burn. In those days neither I felt to fill up the pages of my diary as everything that I used to pen down became a part of my routine thoughts nor I identified any temptation within me to stalk you standing, at night, under a street lamp as I grew wary of you. But the guilt of pushing you at the brink of a hallucination didn't leave me and made intrusions, often, to shatter the fragility of my reincarnated thoughts. I was surviving in a chiaroscuro of emotions - light in finding a reincarnated me and shade of fear of losing you.

"I limited my visits not because I didn't want to trouble you but to stay away from a gloomy numbness that gripped me by finding you jaded and de-spirited whenever I met you. But when you shared, with me, your sighs of relief my breath too echoed the same and I immediately liberated and acquitted myself of all my guilt. And as soon as I sensed freedom, the sins of my mood illuminated and brought back my fixation with you. Your hallucinations and overcoming them appeared an enigma to me - I felt it a story contrived by you. And I entered into your house at nights with an anticipation to unearth any silhouette of testaments to them as well as in search of answers of all my notions that I wished to get a glimpse of. I roamed through your house with senses watchful from you and actions to discover any scattered portion of your hidden secrets - I opened and closed the drawers of tables and hunted through the shelves. After tiring myself up with searches, I made a small visit to that room where I wrote my diary to breath in sanity in my senses but discovered that the imaginations, the feelings the room housed earlier were no more, instead it posed me with the same question - what will I achieve in that moment, on that day when I will discover the unknown secrets about you. I didn't like the question and hence I didn't use to spend time in that room and leave your place. And so my tryst with you started to fade away.

"It was only yesterday night that I came to know that you visited a psychiatrist and you were detected with Scopophobia when I found a doctor's prescription paper to you at a corner of a drawer of the table of your bedroom. A piercing chill of weightlessness ran through me that made me numb and the beats of my heart turned dragged with a feeling of long pauses in between. I immediately left your place and as I reached my home, I was brimming with regret the entire night and mourning the imminent loss. I felt like standing under an inky canopy where your voice, breath and touch were echoing and fading away slowly. At the break of the dawn, I gathered myself up, opened up my diary to reach for the last written page and as I noticed the uneven edge the page that remained after you torn that it, I felt a touch of sunshine on my eyes and I didn't know when I had let the heaviness of my heart go away.

"I wanted to tell you all these in the form of a last meet with you but my diary made me communicate to you in the form which you had liked the most in our relationship. You are not suffering from any hallucination or Scopophobia - whoever you have seen often from your window under the street light, in the middle of the darkness was not your imagination but it was me stalking you. Whatever you have read in the pages of my diary was my monologue of soliloquy. I am returning the duplicate key to you that I made by deriving an impression of the original key of your home on a soap to enter into your house at night.

"I am a free person today but an aged oak soft in the light of a burning fire who like watching the morning sunlight streaming through the window. Someday I would sit in a chair under the warmth of that sunlight and reflect back if there was ever an element of time in our relationship that allowed me to feel a strong love, like an orange glow bursting over a dark horizon, if I want to stay there forever with you and if I am today the person I was destined to be.

____________"

That day, life came in full circle. Until I read that letter, I believed that the only dimension that our story had was myself. But when I read the letter, I sat on that chair, placed it on that study desk again and saw some secret dots emerging that seamlessly got connected to the existing ones and revealed a new dimension to our story. And as I reflect back now to join my reminiscences with this letter, I realized I am also a free man now - free from the sins of my mood.

I still have with me the page of her diary that I tore the night she wrote, to treasure it for the rest of my life -

"I had fallen in love with your place - there are fireside chairs, warm colors and a peacefulness around me these days. I want to sit in that chair and feel the warmth that radiates, my skin illuminated by the light. I, now a days, like to walk in to this room, to gently push on the door and feel it beneath my palm. And in your embrace the world just stops still on its axis - there is no time, no wind, no rain. It’s a magical feeling and causes me to shiver in complete pleasure and ecstasy.

"I think I have lived long enough on this earth to know that what we share is something that I can't replicate with other. So whether this heart beats another day or another hundred years - it is yours."