Cwtch

...

An embrace.

Loving, protecting, safeguarding and claiming. With intimacy, earnestness, ownership. A safe place in two peoples' hearts.

So I ask her again. Do you know what is that thing which will heal ? And let you breathe a bit. You've been holding that breath for too long, do you realise that.

Have seen fuller eyes but not ones that can brim so much and still hold for hours, years. She is not with me, or anyone. Looks away with hesitation, afraid of resting eyes on something forbidden, reliving ununderstood words, uncertain what to feel.

A silent hour between midnight and dawn. Even when broken by life, scattered in space, at this hour, seeing the sky always makes her dream. She closes her eyes.

Isnt it quiet. The city sleeps early of late. Fatigued around each other all day, in and out of rooms, companionships, pretences. It is quiet, and flute plays in a soft night raga with muted tanpura underneath.

The moon is crayoned and calm. Sometimes behind a cloud in usual transience. Stars are sparse, her pole star unmoved at his distance, always giving an illusion of looking at her.

She feels as if each of these, soft light of the moon, skin touching hair caressing breeze, the sky the quiet the darkness this one solitary magical moment in time, every element of creation perceptible to her senses is nothing but bits of him.

The flute is without an end.

I ask her. Do you know what is that one thing which will heal ? And let you breathe a bit?

...

Avenues

Sand and cement were in abundance. Only if they knew how to seek a little space, and how to take the shape of four walls, there might have been a home.

Alas they didnt. Instead, layered over soft earth to create two avenues, along which, these two souls, went on travelling forever.

Two avenues therefore.
Spending lives past each other, carving each other out, finding ways through each other, letting go of each other often... to be lost in unfamiliar parts of the city. Meeting again at sunset horizons. To be lost into each other like two blending colours of dusk.

Thus met the two of them as well. Not when thirsting, not when forgetting, but only when their paths chanced to become one for a little while along the journey.

Every few years, the avenues would freeze and so would their tired feet. At that frozen moment, one, or perhaps both of them, would pause to think of the home that never was. It could have been ... why did it never. They would look at their own trails in bewilderment as if throwing the very question at two indifferent Möbius avenues -

Why did it never ?

They gazed hard and long at the road as if to force a foundation and make a magical home emerge right there from nowhere.

And implausible as it may sound, that makeshift home would then appear from someone's impossible dream. And the two of them would sit and smile and talk and go about their day as if they have been living in that home forever.

...

[Adaptation of an excerpt from Amrita Pritam's "Yeh Kahani Nahi"]