Things That Can't be Strategised

They sat there in Mc Donalds having a meal for two. She kept staring at him while he was busy doing his work, sending mail after mail, attending calls. It didn't felt as if they had met after six months. They both were so calm. she tried to pay attention to what he kept telling her about his work. But her mind drifted to some other place, some other time.

Her mind flooded with memories as she took the last bite of the burger.

One year ago.. 
The same person who was sitting in front on him was talking over phone with her. They were planning for their trip to some places. "I won't need a phone there, will you?" he asked. "Yes of course, I will", she said with that tint of slyness. She could see his eyebrows frown through the phone even when he knew she was kidding.

"Okay, I'll keep staring at you when you'll be busy. What else will my mind think of when I'll have you sitting next to me". She smiled at all his cheesy lines back then. They planned nearly impossible things together.  

Now after all this time, all she could do was stare at him blankly while he had his eyes glued to the macbook screen. Such an asshole, she thought. In the past few months, she learned that self harm was too mainstream.

It doesn't take much for anyone to step out of their skin. Or someone's life, or any situation.. idk. Now she dines alone some days, watching people around her. To her it's like.. no more hollow conversations. People look at her. All those movies make them think that sad people go to restaurants alone. It's the food that gets her attention the most anyways.

Her

This post is written by a guest writer...

DivyaDan Lakra | IITB | Lives in Mumbai 

She was a beautiful girl and her eyes looked like the way a puddle does on a rainy days. Her smile was magical, and her laugh, even more so. And she had plenty of admirers, evident from the wide gapes and frequent stares. But she never really paid attention to any of that. She never went out with anyone. She never dated any guy at all. I proposed her to be my girlfriend, she denied. She told me we were friends and I believed her. We were friends.

I would find myself thinking about her in the middle of my work. I would hear something funny and I would get this urge to call her up and tell her and hear her laugh at the other end. And for the first time in my life, I was scared. The girl whose eyes lit up like they could set fire to a forest when I told her about the things I loved, scared me.

It was pretty late into the spring when she confessed that she was starting to grow on me. I liked talking to her and listening to her voice. She would always ask me about my day. I liked knowing what she had to say about everything I told her. She asked a lot of questions. Sometimes she would put forth her opinion, other times she would just nod and wave it off with a vague laugh. She liked listening to me too.

She changed her mind a bit too often. So much that one would think that she was a different person every week. The way she would remember something I told her months ago. She remembered all the dates; dates when we met, the environment and our anniversary, and funnily enough, I don’t remember much about any of those. She would listen to my stories with such curiosity that made my voice grow heavy and by the end of the story, her eyes would look like she already knew everything.

I remember this one time when we met during the summers. It was late evening, dark. I was leaving the next day. She kept on saying not to leave so early. The emotions and gloom of those words from her lips wished to cuff me there longer. I said,” No, I have to go” .When you are in a long distance relationship you don’t know what things to say, what words to utter when you are standing in front of her, few centimeters away. And it was pretty bad because I did it.

She hugged me and she looked happy. That was the thing about her, she always looked happy, even when she wasn’t. There was a wonderful thing about her presence too. When she was in room, you could never feel her presence but when she left, everyone felt her absence. I always knew that if she ever left, she was the girl who would haunt me for the rest of my life. And deep down, I always knew she would leave. She was never the staying type. And I knew that when she would go, I would let her go, that too with every ounce of dignity in my being. Because she was a weird wild fire and world has her jungle. I was nothing but a tree she chose to blow kisses on her way.

And I was right, she left. And she left without a word. And I think that’s kind of fair, because if she couldn’t stay, how could her words. I didn’t reach out to her, neither did she, because I knew that just being with her own self was too much for her and she needed to get away from herself.  And honestly, I didn’t mind.  Have you ever found a book or a song that was really beautiful, and beautiful in a way that it wasn’t to anyone else? And it’s beauty felt like a hurricane coming down on you and you felt terrified. So you kept it hidden, afraid that if you read the book again or listened to the song once more, you wouldn’t feel the way you did the first time. I don’t know if it makes sense to you but this is why I let her go. It seemed right. ….because she wasn’t just a girl. She was a train wreck, and I don’t think anyone can live on the inside of it, anyone but her. She was insane in her own ways and I was there to pacify hurricanes within her.