Myself in Golden Shoes

He is unmissable simply because he is so loud when he is having fun ..and he is always having fun and this predisposition of his combined with the fact that he can be counted on to listen, give plentiful advice and be there for family, friends and often total strangers made him special. He lives life like a dream, perfect dream. Always on run with the huge fortune of having something to run from or run to, a blessing in disguise. His life looks the most colorful of all while he lives in a inner world of grey to black to blue. He is the craziest contradiction, a anomaly. And then  she happens to him.

She who always made two cups of tea on the principle that someone might just turn up in time. And if (as it almost invariably happened) no one did, why she was indeed in the mood for a second cup, thank you.

The spaces and angles of her kitchen ( her home, her life) often led her to how efficiently, smugly even, it catered to the needs of one. the light through the cracked pane on the front window, for example, fell exactly on her mug, bathing it in a sunrise/ sunset glow.  Two mugs there would make it crowded, diffuse.

All her daily, minute rituals resolved around this singular existence.  She needed to wash  dishes in the night because she hated waking up to a sink full of dirty vessels; the bed was made in the time that water boiled for tea ;the bedroom and living room windows were opened in the morning, dining and kitchen ones in the evening.

She didn’t know, not really how much comfort there was in these little homages she paid to herself. Not until they were stripped from her from the man made storm.

It began with a phone call heralding a visitor for the weekend.  Thrumming with anticipation, her as yet innocent heart unaware of the impending doom, her Friday shopping was doubled, as was her joy at having someone over. She took pleasure in agonising over tea times and desserts, fruits and snacks. She felt the pinch of pressure to finish her cooking before the rumble of his arrival. She got her wish: her work was done and he still hadn’t arrived…but now she fretted at his lateness. She tried to read, but found herself flipping the pages, seeing random words but no plot no character

At last he came, in a flurry of apologies and complaints against the iron monsters of our age. she was becalmed that night in his presence, in the quiet busyness of anticipating his wants and being rewarded with his smile. The old shoe comfort of having his night-sounds to fall asleep to, his breath her wallpaper as she slept.

The next morning she was almost unreasonably happy, with herself and with him: for their being, and for their being there. The morning blended with the afternoon and blurred into the evening – where there were two cups and two voices and a single setting sun that slanted its good byes as they spoke, at ease in their skins of their lives and loves with that rarefied sense of being insubstantial except for their minds.

That night as they slept, she woke to his warm hand on her waist. She lay still, hardly daring to breathe, wondering whether he was asleep or awake. she saw that he was quiet definitely asleep, transgressing invisible lines in inviolable unconsciousness of it. As she lay with his skin on hers, she felt that this was right, somehow, that the last two pieces of a jigsaw had fitted seemingly into the whole.

When she woke up in the morning the hand was gone.

All through the day as she spoke and laughed with him, she wondered. Did he have any memory of touching her ? Had he perhaps snatched his hand away on waking, embarrassed and hoping she hadn’t noticed ?Or had he regretfully removed it ?Or- as he had placed it -his hand had merely slipped off during the sleep, leaving him serenely unconscious of the turmoil he has created for her ?

As the day wore on, she found herself impatient for night, where at least there was a possibility of being touched…Her skin quivered each time he passed her, she felt magnetised, polarised by his presence- every atom of her body straining towards him to replicate the sensation of the night before. As her longing grew, she (dis)ingenuously found ways in which to brush against him, microscopic variations and repetitions of touch…Was it her imagination, or did he look for such gaps in time and space ?

Her yearning turned into a kind of restlessness, wanting and not wanting and a need to keep wanting that left her at odds with herself. She dropped things and bumped against things and felt jittered to an inch of her nerves as the time came to turn out the lights and fall asleep.

As they lay in the darkness, as she listened to his breath and hers, she felt a passing pang for their old comfort, conspicuous by its absence. Then she saw herself move, as if from far away, so that the tips of her fingers were touching his. She saw him shift, turn towards her so that their faces were closer…so close that she could feel his eyelashes fluttering. His lips sough hers or hers sought his, or they sought each others…the outcome of all these possibilities being that they kissed ; if  ‘kissed’ could sufficiently describe the melting inside her, the electricity that turned her skin to quicksilver, glimmering within and upon him.

The night was as long as they could spin it out, sweet strings of cotton candy sticking to their fingers and gluing their lips. At some point she felt herself wondering weather he truly was kissing her, whether he wasn’t searching for someone else in her body. But the thought didn’t last, no thought could in the onslaught of affection that she wasn’t sure she had wanted to start, and wasn’t at all ready to end.

The light of dawn crept upon the voices of birds, and suddenly she felt exposed, as though with the light he would recognize her, and move away. But he saw her, looked deep in her eyes and instead of moving away, moved ever inwards inside her burrowing to the sweet kernel of desire he knew was in her.

When it was over, she felt like she had been turned inside out, so that all her soft tissue, all her pink and red organs were out on display for him and everyone else to see.  She was irretrievably OTHER now, not her, mysteriously transmitted by the alchemist touch of him.  She felt her old self receding , fading at the speed of light, while she tried to gain perspective on this raw, new being : naked and just born, taking her shape. And yet in all these momentous happenings, the morning was still taking shape,  not yet fully light.

She could not and would not look up into his eyes, for fear of whom she would see reflected there. she couldn’t even look at her self, fearing to see fingerprints pressed this way and that into her skin. She knew that he couldn’t understand this,  that he couldn’t see the sea change in her ; that he expected her to show an emotion that they could share.  She stimulated a cautious happiness and saw it redoubled in his eyes and his lips. But what she felt was a new restlessness, now to be alone, to gather herself and make sense of all this.

When at long last she got her wish, an unexpected bubble of happiness made it way through her veins, turning her limbs and her mind liquid. Then as parts of the night came to her mind unbidden, she felt the liquid turn to fire, rising to clamour against her skin and drop away endlessly. When she finally looked at herself, she thought she was transparent, her body had shape and texture only with him there to view it. The day passed along an arc of desire, the pendulum of her heart moving between willing and unwilling wanting, a non-conclusive reasoning with her to herself.

She thought by the end of the day, that she had understood his cipher in her life, and now that she understood, she would be proof against his desire.  A desire which doesn’t have any intended place in her life. So out of a scientific curiosity, almost, she arranged to meet him. She expected the awkward edges to their words, she expected gazes to glance off each other without meeting, she expected the pauses to gape awkwardly between polite words. She expected him to behave as he used to and she conditioned herself to behave as she used to.

What she didn’t expect was that on seeing him, the pulse of desire would throb in the air between them, her skin would call out for his touch that the distance would feel artificial and tense as elastic. That when they finally collided into each other’s arms, her breath would come to her lungs on a glad scoop….lips that had a moment ago felt dry and constricted would part with a softness and delicacy that proclaimed they had been made for this, the curves and hollows of her frame were intended to weld in just such a fashion with his, that her eyes would hold him and his, her, so that all the other thoughts would be reduced to an inconsequential babble, everything in and  around them,  would just peter out..this, she had not expected.

Above all, she had not expected her mind to cede its pride of place, to be ruled and overruled by the sensual being lurking in her skin, who basked in his lingering gaze, in the tracery of his lips, that pulled and tweaked at her heart beat till she surrendered to his arms-the view over his shoulder being all that she needed of the world. And when those arms went around her to bring her closer to an extension of herself,  she for the first time in her life, felt what being complete is..

At first the moment they spent apart were merely the pauses in their togetherness, a chance to savour absence so that reunion would be all the sweeter.  She  felt like they were dancers out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Then , as the hours spun into days and then weeks her mind reasserted itself. She was troubled by the fragile yet persistent sound of the world drawing nearer. The thought would come, also , that in that world they did not belong together, they didn’t even belong individually to the same world.

She tried to drown such thoughts out by spinning the web of their intimacy thicker and more intricate. But the sour taste of alone-ness began to seep through to their time together, as she started anticipating the moment of farewell rather than shared presence. The pain twisted along a corkscrew thread in her heart as she thrust him, herself, away from her. She dodged and evaded him through words and silences, and congratulated herself when she saw the distance increasing in her omniscient foolishness; she thought that she was receding from him towards success that her alone-ness by virtue of being self imposed and-engineered would never turn to loneliness.

In all this, he hurt, he wondered and wondered as she spun away on different trajectories, not taking into account that her isolation must perforce spill onto him as well. He reached out for her, broke through her walls- once, twice, again and again. She would meet him with renewed resolve, only to split into a million slivers of glass with each creeping doubt. She thought in contrary couplets: wanting him became inextricably linked with not wanting to want him. Absurdly, he felt like he had lost a point of being audible, even though it was hardly a sound more an out letting of air, really why did all this have to be so calculated, so mechanical, and yet at the end of it all- something over which he had absolutely no control ? He thought of all the words-prose poetry and gibberish – devoted to love, and wondered once more why the ideal, the ultimate abstraction had to be reduced to the simple, concrete task of extending one’s hand an inch or two …what would be solved by that ? Everything . Nothing. The rifts, the silences, the hurt, old and new, said and unspoken, would remain. The cut glass refracted gaze of tears would remain. She would still be herself, only that. And he would be his own self, Yesterday wouldn’t change, and neither would tomorrow. And slowly he withdrew, bewildered and cut to shreds by the sharp points of her doubts.

And so she lost him, to the sophistries of her own mind. Then next morning, the rituals of singleness returned….

And as it was with the God’s pranks, the unwilling togetherness was send to them again. And once and YES once again, when the time brought their hands together . Their Eyes felt the same knowingness and heart for once felt the same fluctuation in beats. Smiles were faked, yet eyes ritually twinkled, for old habits die hard.

She held on, with all her mind, to the index finger so that it would not turn traitor on her. She concentrated on the pink tips of his four fingers that used to wind their way around her hair tugging at random clumps as if to make sure they were fixed properly. Her gaze, diamond hard , took in her own fingers that wanted nothing so much as to be against his cheeks-tips touching bones to form a frame for his face. To look upon those eight fingers and two thumps was to look at fragments of their myriad embraces and intimacies, most of them unthinking and all o f them unique. To see them, as they had been and maybe even to find a wry laugh inside for what they had become: where lifting a finger had all the implications and repercussions of a declaration of a nuclear war.

And there, on that hand that was a million small miles away on the table, on her third finger, gold would continue to gird flesh and bone, and mock them both for their naïveté and their solipsism….