And Again

The world around her had slowed down, its movement negligible to what was happening in her life. A week ago, she had shot past twenty-one without a permanent address and a bank account. She had felt like she was pushing against a wall with all her might, without managing to move a single brick. She had run for miles to escape that feeling, running away from the wall. She had written pages, reverting to the traditional ink and paper routine, abandoning the plasticity of the black keyboard. She wrote and smeared, hoping it would bring her some peace of mind. She wrote about mothers and marriages and death in different countries, spaces, time periods. She wrote of how politics and sport were both banal, about the world becoming one giant county with a lot of barriers. She wrote of her neighbour’s non-existent affair and made up other such stuff. She copied passages from books she loved, and had read five times over. She tried to imitate the styles of different authors, realizing very soon how futile that was, how quickly it sapped her off the last bit of originality. One by one, all her avenues of escape, of release failed her. She felt holed up in a corner of the universe reserved for losers mired in insignificance. She was never looking for fame and aplomb. Or even applause. Just an assertion of life.

And then one day, it happened. It happened far away from her impermanent address and her sordid routine. It happened in the mountains, in fresh mountain air. In the early morning rain, she washed away all the pretence and the feel of the wall against her frame. The swirls of smoke found a clear passage to her brain, filled it with images of her past and her present. She looked hard at them as they surrounded her, whizzed past her like in a movie. She held her hand out, tried to grasp them. She only caught rain. But it was magical, magical the way the smoke transcended its sorry stick of origin, the way it passed from the lip to the nostril and then back, from her lips to others. She found comfort in this sharing, this collective knowledge of feeling alive. She felt the imprint of their lips on hers, through sharing. They sat huddled in a dark room, cramped because of lack of space, their bodies pushing, adjusting. Yet she felt far away from the human mass surrounding her, from her own body. It was like looking at herself from outside her mind. She felt irresponsible, completely free like it wasn’t her body at all. Her mind was focussed on the tip of the snow capped peak that played hide-and-seek behind a fluttering curtain. The deep blue dark, turning slowly to light, was capturing her mind. She had never seen anything so beautiful, anything so clear and unadulterated. She felt like crying and laughing at the scene, at her own estranged body. At what it was doing. She could feel herself breathing for the first time, breathing outside the compulsion of existing. She had only read about such moments in other people’s stories, envying their ability to run away from daily existence, transcend the banal and create an ever present past. Now she had one of her own, like her own child. She did not need another person’s outlet to find her own. One by one, every peak was lit. In the mountains, dawn was hidden and yet palpable. Everywhere she looked there was calm. There was no flutter, no sound that disturbed her, no face that smudged the perfection of the moment. The smoke continued to swirl long after. It became a part of the room, the walls, the little night stand, the ugly blue blanket that she was sprawled out on.

During the course of the night, she had found her way to the blanket, put her head down and lost her sense of time and place in its downy comfort. She was aware of people pushing past one another, returning to their rooms. But she wasn’t going anywhere, not leaving the space she occupied even for a moment. She loved it right there; the blanket was her room, her space. She felt a hand go around her, a face closing in on her, brushing its nose against her cheek. She wanted to cry, hold on to the hand for longer and make it her own. She couldn’t feel her own body, she could only feel the one next to her, with its lips grazing her neck. Her mind kept playing a song, an apt one, about oddness. A song she never listened to, something she knew she would never listen to again. She turned her head away from the mountains and looked into eyes that she did not know. Would never know completely. She didn’t care, didn’t bother. It was her moment and there was no need for specifications, no need for details that would ruin everything. She drew in the air between their lips, the air they had shared for so long. For once there was no smoke, only clarity. A whisper passed from one earlobe to the other and quietly, her world changed. It expanded in her head, outgrew its contours, multiplied with abandon. In her mind, she was little again running up a downward sloping slide, slipping in the mud, dirtying her white dress. In her mind she was fourteen again and in love. In her mind, every moment she had been happy, collided with this one and for a fraction, she attained a kind of perfection people try to lunge at throughout their lives. She kept her eyes closed for a very long time, in hope of holding on to the moment for longer, in hope of preserving and reproducing it later, when her life once more was caught by the banal. She opened her eyes again and before her were the mountains she had fallen truly in love with. She turned away and stared at them till the snow caught the glare of the morning sun and she had to look away.

An hour later, she walked to the balcony, sat on the cane chair and began rocking it to and fro profusely. She cried bitterly as the tears finally came. Her mind was not clouded anymore, not sad anymore. She found happiness in crying. The more she cried, the better, the lighter she felt. She cried till she felt weightless, like a body bobbing around in the clear mountain air. Hours later, while walking down a narrow stretch of road, she caught sight of her face in a mirror. She smiled at her eyes and the thin line that divided her chin into two unequal halves.