Learn to dance in the rain

When it thunders deafeningly outside, you won’t think of her anymore.
Or how she used to love the storms.
You’ll push the rotating glass door of her favourite cafe, her favourite Paisley number will greet you inside.
The aroma of THAT cafe au lait will hit you as you take your seat in THAT corner. The smell of those Mocha Caramel Pecan cookies will waft through the clustered confinement. But the smell won’t choke you.

For you will have already forgotten all that by then.

Details.
Unnecessary details elude our lives.

She will be sitting at Flurys, right across the street, facing your cafe.
Glasses on her nose.
Wearing an intent look.
Flipping through her paperback.

Meaning to keep an eye on you?

Is it?

Suddenly her lemongrass perfume.
You can’t forget that. Nay.
You haven’t.

It’s raining outside.
You notice it.
NOW.
Slowly.

‘A woman not yet seen, but whose perfume accumulates on the horizon like a storm cloud.’
( Fernand Dumont)

Don’t let the sun go down on you

“He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it’s the same kind of hunger.”

 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You’re coming at six, then. ” She smelt her hair.

I’m ready.

“I will try to. ” The tenor voice was still unruffled, unyielding.

The staccato clicking of heels on the road, irregular.

A brown paper bag wearing a hideous face, laughing peek from behind her skirt.

The screeching halt of a black convertible.

Bobbing young heads giggling.

Deafening honk of the bus behind her.

“Ma’am, care to step aside?”

The heels protest, stumbling across from the road to the pavement, now crowded.

The evening has arrived already, once more, unannounced.

Liar. Liar. He never ‘tried’ to come. 

Why would he?

You bin the brown bag in the trash.

You buy your groceries instead.

“How much will that be?” She tried to smile. In vain.

Oh, wait! I need that paperback! Latest in the Tom Thorne series! 

“Add this one too, to all that stuff.”

She smiles now.

You drift away far from the world you so love.

You let yourself realise, in a positive way, for the first time, everyone is alone in this.

And everyone’s in it, for their own selves.

You don’t have anyone to hold your hand when you wake up in the morning and say:

“Please don’t die. 

For tomorrow’s another day.

When I wish to see your auburn hair glow in the sun like this, again.“

You don’t, for you are in this life for yourself.

And so’s everyone else.

We live alone. Fight alone. Perish alone. For ourselves.

Not necessarily bad, innit?

Humans are the only kind cursed with the knowledge of their perpetual solitude.

Humans are also the only kind blessed with enough things to keep ourselves occupied with, all our lives, so as to fight ‘being alone’.

Till, once in a while, we come face to face with our own selves on a mirror.

And the myths you so carefully contrived, crumble down. And you wallow in unprecedented grief.

But that’s only once, every winter.

For now, she knows, ‘being alone’ is a human condition.

Loneliness, however, is a choice.

As for now, she’ll run off to check her To-do list to add ‘Grab the latest copy of “Inferno” ‘

She digs in time-defying, scintillating thrillers.

Don’t you too?