Alter Ego

 

He started writing about her sometime back. Shu, her name is. She was an interesting girl. An interesting character, I mean. She had been dissembling with others for a long time. It was such a long time that she couldn’t even understand that with whom she was dissembling? Others or herself. But when she came to him, to his imagination, he already knew  that she will be past those follies of hers. But he never had a hint that he would lose the control over her. What others’ words couldn’t do, her silence could, very easily, piercing through his ears of grief. Rather than he shaping her through his imagination, she would start shaping his imagination.” What would she say to me?” or “How would she react if someone did this to her?” were kind of the questions that pre-occupied his mind. 

He would ask himself “Would she have liked me if I met her?” and then would hate himself, not because he wagered at a coin toss at an infinite distance but for the sense of pity he had for himself. 

A day before his marriage he sits at his desk in a desperate attempt of trying to complete Shu. His thoughts shadowed by the immense restlessness in his head, stopping the ink from turning a bud into a twig. He closes his eyes just to find her sitting in a less lit corner of her imagination like a dark angel. He walks towards her and stops at a distance. 

He bends down,sighs and says “Shu, I couldn’t complete you.”  

She smiles subtly and says in an echoing voice “Byja, was it me whom you were trying to complete?  “. After a pause she said again “End the tyranny of the past over your heart. If you can take a leave from your romanticism then why not quit working for fear? It’s not that you are afraid of losing me. Is that even possible, Byja? Contemplation is good to an extent but not when everyone else is trying things, you are just getting old, contemplating about those very things. All I can say is that uproar is your only music, stability isn’t.” 

He said ” I know that I owe truth to my dead past and I know that the entire existence is in this present which is slipping away in an almost terrifying way. But I am not afraid of that, Shu. What I am afraid of is the eternal isolation. And that is because I couldn’t complete you.” 

She sighed “Ask yourself Byja, What if you could ever complete me? What after that? You have to understand that I am different from your other creations. I am your everlasting mystique poetic verse in which the wind will always keep blowing in the dark woods full of whistling branches of the trees and the wolf would never hurt anyone because it would stay in dormancy covered with the blanket of whistles.”    

She turned away, started walking towards the origin of dusky lights, paused and said “Return salvated my love as there is no space and time between us. Even if you want, you can’t remain away from me. Tomorrow is the day when we become one. Just have faith in me and we will meet.”  

She walks away leaving her blue foot prints behind.

His ink dries without even a word being written.

-pras

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