Love On The Pages

29

"What were you doing there?" after the game was wrapped up and all retired to bed, Sana and Sidharth found themselves to be away from the blanket of sleep yet. Sana was bowled why his words, and found it improbable. Forgotten is the time when her hopes were very mercilessly supressed within her and she has learnt to keep that way. It wasn't out of being great or magnifying her virtuosity of letting go of someone for their happiness but was out of her selfish reasons. To protect herself from the omen of being heartbroken and scarred of love. She has everytime praised love for its beauty and magnificence but has always neglected the pain it leaves one to endure with. The inevitable and inseparable part of it. Thus, she has put the desires at rest. Like the Buddha says, "desire is the root to pain", and she has with expertise tried to cut off that root, only she didn't take into consideration, of how she is a human, where they desires and expectation are as inevitable to the nature of it, as love is to pain, as destruction is to anger and as death is to life. In his adjacency, of just a few days, and those at rest were up surging ready to usurp the throne of protectiveness towards herself.

"Game, khel rahe the!", he exclaimed in all innocence, disregarding the game they were having of their own.

"Of course I know that Sidharth, I am talking about the extra phrases you added", she was all serious for this time, she knew what power his words hold on her.

"I guess, I was flirting", he smirked unaware of the ramification his words caused on. She felt something crash, and deep in her she knew it was the fortress build by the expectation that was being besieged, and overrun was the territory too. She looked at him, to find a hope, a probable loophole that could give her the needed victory, over the thrashed citadel. But she found nothing. She passed on a smile to him, as he tunred to look at her and mirrored the smile but not the sentiment beneath that smile.

"So you meant nothing of that", she wished to ask him, but ended up just saying "I would like to be leave"

"Are you sleepy?", he managed to ask, for he wanted to be with her. The words he said while the game was on the run, wasn't a prevarication. It wasn't. Though, as he said, he was flirting, doesn't imply he was lying. He meant his words, and he hoped she has understood them, as he said. He was willing to give a chance to 'them', but was scared. He was scarred enough to stand up again for a battle with no armour. He wasn't yet. He had his own inhibitions, but he was trying and ready to let those scars heal, as he stands tall again to embrace the newness of that particular feeling. Scared he was, and he was admitting that to himself, and despite being scared he was lured to the same path when she was there, for he expected and believed she wouldn't leave him scarred how Maahi did.

"Yeah!!", she replied and walked away, leaving him disheartened and her broken. What was it, between them that despite the closeness, was pushing them away too. His pained experience and her trying to control her emotions more than a person could and a person should. Like, the same poles of magnet, which no matter, how much they wanted to be close, are repulsed by the similarity. The inhibitions to liberate them was their repulsion point, and they couldn't even realise that. Realisation, it comes the hard way, and when it comes, it doesn't come alone but many more things accompany it and the nature of those things, the time could only tell.

"Good night, sleep well", his words managed to reach her ears, but she refrained the reply to it. Her words, she perceived could not reach him, with how fumbled they would be, because her eyes were misty and throat strangled with unshed tears.

"Why is it so difficult to make me feel the same that I have been feeling all these years, unaffected?" she questioned herself locked in the washroom, sobbing and sniffing, letting the tears wash the hurt that was so vivid on her features. Tears were needed, she understood, for they were the way out of the bottled up emotions.