excerpt - 1

(Here is an excerpt from a story i am working on. I don't think it gives away the story at all, and i just felt like sharing it.)

Lately, people look at her and wonder why she looks so good? "You are glowing! Are you in love?" She laughs in their faces like it’s a preposterous idea and then turns around to tell them yes she is. She is in love with herself. It is true. She is. Has always been. It is not the complete truth now, is it? But, they don't need to know. All the same, the thought stays there, like a dab of perfume on her wrists, that when her body temperature is just right, when she moves her hands so, and when the air blows over it in the right direction, a waft of fragrance, the idea - I am in Love. She walks around with a stupefied grin, she covers it up with even stupider stories, and she wonders where all those lies come from? Amidst all of this, it stays there, this image - I am in Love. It survives doubt, as it rears its ugly head and wonders if it is not just another regular crush? It lies in wait, as something like fear cripples her muscles and she just cannot turn to look at him as he passes her by. It manages to elude logic, as it wakes her up in the wee hours of morning asking her, what she plans to prove, by being able to hide it, from the one person, who should, in fact, know how matters really stand? She smiles back at her own self, in defiance, because amid the chaos that is her mind, standing alone, is the thought - I am in Love, like its an argument in itself, a reason all unto its own, an irrefutable absolute.

What she hides from the world, she tells the stars, the trees, and the moon, and when late at night, she stands in her balcony, waiting for sleep, the easterly wind blows in her hair and whispers in her ears "We know." Of course they know, they all know! It is self evident. So in a rare moment of valor she tells him too. In her mind, he rolls his eyes and tells her "I know." There the argument rests, that everyone who needs to know, already does, and those who don't, do not need to be told. She lingers around, staring in to the heart of the night, the streetlight merges with the moonlight, a hint of fragrance from Pradhan Aunty's blooming night-queen surrounds her, and a wispy, fragile, dream begins to take shape. It happens night after night that she stays awake for hours, and does not get a wink of sleep, and yet when people see her in the morning, they tell her, she looks rested, happy, and so much better than ever. She thinks she has single-handedly shattered the myth of the beauty sleep, too bad, she cannot enlighten the world. She passes him in the corridors and looks away, not knowing what to say to him, because did he not tell her he already knew? Then, in a panic, she remembers that he did not actually say that, she had imagined that. She watches him leave, spellbound, unable to move. The real and the imaginary have overlapped so far beyond it is hard to tell which is which. So in the deranged, muddy, confusion in her brain, she desperately holds on to the one piece of sanity, that little grain of truth, her last coherent thought – I am in Love.