I apologise for breaking the story and only putting excerpts, but I must.
Through the narrow, three-foot-wide window, hooked in an iron frame and tangled with a worn mosquito net, barely hinged in the corner of my dorm room, I could see the overcast sky swirling with withered, gloomy gray clouds. It looked like rain was imminent—or perhaps a storm. A cold storm brewing deep into the winter night. It must have been around seven in the evening when I finally finished a lengthy coding assignment that had drained not just five hours of concentrated effort, but ten hours of my soul—far more than I ever intended to give. This was on top of the all-nighter I’d pulled the previous night, one even colder than today, which nearly froze my fingertips as I walked back from the library at the hour of the wolf. Today, however, had been humid throughout. Fatigue coursed through my nerves, fingertips, and bones alike as I finally broke free from my seated stance for what was probably only the second time since waking up. As I stretched my limbs, my joints crackled like dry wood, echoing the exhaustion etched into my very bones. As the clouds cast a shadow over my only source of light, a sudden breeze crept in through the cracks, slipping past my eyelids. My eyes grew heavy, and my body sank into the stateless abyss of the sagging bed, its rugged mattress worn from nearly three years of constant use. A sharp pain punctuated the steady nudge of exhaustion, and my consciousness began to slip away. From the corridor, a noise filtered through—a distant hum against my half-asleep mind. The lights remained unturned, the door left ajar. As soon as my eyelids kissed, there was nothing but an endless abyss. For hours, it seemed…
We rode in that cab at eleven on a cold winter night. The withered white clouds had merged into a vast, swirling mass, constantly breaking apart and reforming. At times, the pale moon would peek through, casting a soft glow, only to be swallowed again by the clouds. Occasionally, a flash of lightning would rip across the sky, its thunderous rumble lingering in the air, revealing patches of a dauntingly clear night illuminated by the moon’s faint radiance. A cold breeze cut across my neck, making me flap up the collar of my jacket. A shiver ran down my spine, spreading a chill through my body. I wondered, where had the storm gone?…
Minutes after the iridescent fall of feeble colors from an array of flickering shops befell on my face; after a bleak journey through silent homes and empty streets, we arrived at a luxurious marketplace that opened on a relatively broader avenue, filled with slow-moving crowds. After getting from the cab, I walked behind my friend—rather clumsily—slendering the wrinkles in my attire, as he rushed on the footpath thither the girls waited—the one he knew and the one that I must have found anachronistically—recalling the route as he remembered, on the streets. But before that, help me reader: should I vivify this story that awaits before you and me? And pronounce them with their real names. Should I let you know the name of the market place was Greater Kailash? Did it feel closer? Or should I create any verisimilitude place and names? The former do justice to the memory it serves and the latter to ardent artistic flow I intend to establish between you and me. “Bias you are,” one may claim, “I am.” Bias towards the grotesque reality hung behind me that I have lived only to find it ‘beautiful in pieces’ in retrospect. For at this moment, I am immersed within myself, insouciance to all beings and nought to speak. And hence I will do it poetic justice, and let it befall on this paper, as its nature is. That’s why this story is important, not only to me but you; that’s the only reason any story has to be important—because of it’s true nature…
She wore a quaint blue coat, its fabric looking suspiciously thin for the cold night. The coat hugged her frame, its vintage cut giving it an old-fashioned charm that seemed both deliberate and out of place in the chilly weather. Standing just a bit shorter than me, her black hair framed her oval face, pale and tinged with a soft blush from the cold. A few lazy ringlets fell across one side of her face, the rest neatly tied back. She looked almost statuesque, a marble-carving perhaps, except for the wide, unwavering smile that seemed etched into her expression—a smile that felt a bit too fixed, like she was determined to keep it in place despite the cold, as if she were determined to defy the chill with it, a quiet rebellion against the long winter and its freezing orders. Her brown scarf knitted with several patterns of red and blue, wrapped around her neck in three loose loops, added a touch of warmth, its ends falling lazily down her shoulder in soft, disheveled ringlets. Her friend, by contrast, wore a red, home-knitted sweater of thick wool, snug but slim on her slender frame, and stood a few inches shorter than me…
After scouting around for late-night snacks for the first fifteen minutes, we concluded that at half-past eleven, nothing was open except a 24/7 outlet that offered nothing remotely appetizing. They—the primary couple—decided to stroll through a nearby garden, and I agreed—mostly because I preferred to keep quiet unless absolutely necessary, and partly because walking might ease the fatigue in my legs. In truth, I would have preferred to head back to my room and sleep, but that option was clearly off the table.The garden was a sprawling, chaotic expanse—conjoined lawns and patches of untamed greenery mixed with playgrounds, dense shrubs, towering old trees, scattered stones, and cement benches, all connected by footpaths that twisted and intertwined at odd angles. It extended far and wide, but it lacked proper lighting; the few lamps that existed struggled to cast their dim, weary glow through the fog that hung in the air, which we cut through with each step on the uneven, sometimes bare, ground. Now here, I want to let the reader know that it was almost midnight, and again the chilly nature of the winds. The primary couple—yes, not us but them—had been seen a few times as two blackened nomadic small figures wayfaring as mystical entities, at some undetermined distance apart with unsettled intentions, perhaps with a better intention than us—because I knew I passionately wanted it to end soon! Of course because by what intention—I ask—one meets a girl and exploit the harmony of a silent winter night?
Somehow we ended up near a bower shade along-side an enormous tree with virulent and sharp barks. Let me elucidate you the origin of the phrase: “somehow we ended up,” more vividly. Her soft-skinned hand clasped to my bare fingers in a nuance of suave simplicity. After every couple of minutes—as we strolled—in a shade of flecking moonlight, her silhouette tottered and slantingly collapsed at my lateral torso, and she delivered a bright content smile, while her hand grabbed my waist, and she released an abrupt burst of playful laughter, which was heard by the sprawling branches and their lurking leaves—still crispy with the nippy zephyr. She held my hand and her play of fingers with my cold knuckles carried more taste than our short sentences with which we confabulated, ending with raw and pretentious smiles, and she didn’t let it go. And sometimes, as she laughingly stumbled on me, I—myself—staggered on the side. In one such conspicuous movement of our bodies, we were able to find that bower tree, pitch black in the shade, and covering the gust of ice breeze. We tacitly sojourned on a massive stone that laid there, ‘from centuries,’ I would like to add, which was simply not true.
…carefully, I pulled her down from the stone, and ran my cold dazed fingertips across the warm dip of her spine, inside her sweater—yes, a sensual crime—and she bit my nether lip, while her eyes shone sleet. Now, ‘sleet’ might seem a dramatization of the weather with a literary device, and plainly, it is. But what word would be appropriate for the contrary of the embers of hatred I saw in her eyes the last time I saw her—when it all ended. We were stuck for an hour as of torrential downpour on a Summer night at the time of midnight, behind a computer science building back at my college, under a six feet wide awning, I listened to all the mistakes I have made, unknowingly by me, which were a catastrophic failure for her. It took four months and around a dozen dates to turn this gaudy rhythm into a farce—so dramatic, my laugh came out months later during the next winter, after it all ended—in my room, with nobody to share that precious moment with. That’s the shame I carried, for God knows how long.
Eventually, our ways parted around three in the morning when the drowsiness was so heavy in my eyes that had I gotten a chance to sleep till death on those frozen concrete roads dappling with the streetlights I would have chosen it gladly in an instant. Their house was around the corner, so they went in quickly, but as we rode in that cab, my friend dared to boisterously tease in how he had fun. He didn’t even complete saying, and I almost dozed off in a state where I could only hear the audio from the positioning system of that car driven adroitly by a young fellow with a lanky figure.
That night when I arrived back at my dormitory after living the inexorable set of events where my participation was—at once—an ecstasy and a confusion, it had rained. And I thought she must have written that in her poem if she cared to write as frequently as she said she does. Whether I heard the first patter on the roof of the cab or on the puddles at the roadside, I can’t particularly confirm, but the rain halted as we arrived back and winds of winter had started to blow. Back at my dorm, the first thing I turned on was the heater. Nichrome wire stirred, het up, and blazed a scorching flame with a crimson red glare that flickered throughout the room and I didn’t need to turn on the light. It was the most frigid night of the winter yet, for more than one reason with more than one intention. A paper-thin layer of ice dripped from my palms as I spread them on the front face of red Nichrome wire and it felt like a diaphanous touch of her hand, which I was holding the whole moonlit night; it dried up at once. I touched my cheeks for warmth and the frozen strip of water thawed. It smelled of her; this same fragrance, who knew, I will smell every time I will touch her in the next few months. From her hands, from her hair, from her clothes, all the same—but this smell vanished when she left on that night when she also left a void, floating in the air; which I left dawdling in the after-rain breeze of summer. Perhaps the rain washed her smell clean, but for a long time, I thought that she intentionally left her smell at her home under one of the bookmarks from the memoir she finally completed, which weren’t done the last time I saw them stacked. When I spoke my last words to her, I told her not to die, and the part of ‘her’ in my head followed this advice for a few years until one spring when I tried to imagine her face, only her voice echoed, I must have abandoned her at some dirty corner of my mind, and it didn’t come out for years until three moons ago, when another massive storm struck my town, and out of boredom I tried to find some melancholic memories of past and found it lurking behind the memory where I almost died.