Almost in love

Have I told you about how I once almost fell in love? No. Not in a way you would fall in love with someone, who is unraveled in the course of time, between moments and with whom you can see your life stretched till eternity, till death does you apart. No. I can never imagine enjoying marital bliss with her. She was too infinite for that, too subtle, too free. To marry her would be to bind her, cage a soul into the mire of everyday life.

She was not an accident. Far from it. I was destined to meet her - if not then and there, it must have been here and now, but I had to. Every once in a while, life satiates you in a way that you believe you have discovered it, been there and done it and finally see the unifying pattern that binds souls and events and makes them look like results of a linear equation. And then almost like a non-event, someone arrives and shows you shades and hues on a whitewashed canvas. It could be a word, an unshared thought or even silence and suddenly you feel as if the rug and the roof have been pulled out and you are in the middle of a vast continuum - of life. And it strikes you like an epiphany that, that moment was meant to be.

Now when I think about it, I think it's probably the way she laughed, the way her eyes would widen with a childlike glee and she will break into a fit of laughter throwing her head back as she did that - it was unrehearsed, unconscious, untampered - as pristine as joy itself. It was as if, nothing existed right then but the moment itself, and the joy it was pregnant with. There was no tomorrow, no peril painting itself in the next turn, nothing. You see her and you want to be part of that bubble, to believe in it and see your life begin and end inside it. Probably, that's when I fell in love with her. Almost.

I wouldn't remember the exact time but it was sometime much after midnight. I was standing on the verandah in the fifth floor watching a dozen deteriorating huts just outside her plush flat. I am not exactly sure what I was thinking - It was after whole night of partying and singing and I was drained out physically and emotionally. Standing there surrounded by the emptiness of night felt like being in the vortex of unrest, an emotional void. There was just of hint of sunrise at some distant point in the sky. I could hear her ask for me to those in the room, and in a couple of seconds she was next to me with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in another. There's always something arresting about a sunrise, even a hint of it, that leaves you transfixed and silent. It has a way of filling in silence with something much more profound than what you can ever express.

After what felt like hours, she said, "Isn't it much easier if you are just plain stupid? Never knew you could ask why and never realize there's actually no answer" I said nothing. She continued, "I wish I could always go back, unlearn this realization. That I am just a useless speck and that I can do nothing to change anything". She turned to face me expecting me to say something. I kept staring at the crimson shades in the sky running those words in my head over and over again like a song that's stuck on one's lips. I wasn't sure how long I was standing there but by the time I came into the room, the sun was out and she had left.

A couple of days later, they told me that she had left the city. I got her e-mail address from common acquaintances. But I never knew what to mail her. There was a question to be answered that I refuse to - Because the question is too infinite for an answer, too subtle, too free. To answer it would be to bind it, cage it into a metaphor caught in the mire of everyday life.

And that unanswered question binds us - me to her memory and keeps us caught in a bubble. To answer it would make it a certainty - a result of a linear equation. And to me this state of being almost in love is the most blissful state of all.