I met a boy
I once met a boy, and his eyes were one of the first things that I had noticed about him. His eyes looked like they were constantly weaving stardust into dreams, and scattering them over my eyelids in the same span of breath. They looked just like the fairy tales that I had begged myself to not believe in, anymore. This boy had a smile, that damn near disarmed me the first time I witnessed it. Slow. Unsure. Blooming. He smiled the way a rainbow does, bending his spine to capture the small bubbles of joy life sent his way, and preserved them over his whiskey laced tongue as souvenirs of nights he wouldn't remember later. And over the years, when I first started noticing the cracks, I forgot to look for the sunshine that he might have stored within them. Darkness was all I had looked for, and darkness was what I lost him to. Forever. It doesn't overpower me anymore, you know. The loss. It isn't staggering, and I breathe much easier nowadays. But on days when the road leading home decides to elude itself and abandon me, I often find myself wandering back to the place that once held a boy with unsteady eyes, rumpled hair and a fragile smile. I sit there for hours sometimes, trying to read an old earmarked book and lose myself to water spots that blurred and blobbed itself into existence maybe years ago. I don't hold myself to promises of faraway places anymore. For I have known, places that reek of peace, of hope, and sparkling sunshine, somehow seep through a crack and escape the shadows, only to become one in the end. I have also learnt to not try and build a home out of scraps that make a human, our human. They never last anyway. And yet, I don't let go. I don't want to go home. Maybe it's his words that linger around, or maybe it's my remembrance of the way he would place his lighter over the pages so they couldn't fly in the wind, I find myself not reading the words or understanding them anymore. Instead, I hungrily absorb the shapeless blob of ink, and try to make sense of its being, immersing myself in his thoughts once again. Soon, a nameless number is all he will become in my memory. I carry this knowledge everywhere with me, because I already am losing the details of his face, one part at a time. Shadowy fingers and crumpled sheets, maybe that's what the last stage of grief does to people? It takes away the person, and reduces them to a sum of body parts, like fallen soldiers at the mercy of life, no longer winning, no longer willing. And I know, eventually, he will find his way to my diary, maybe as a nameless entity. Maybe as "the boy". Maybe. Someday, he will, though. For I will write about the boy who I once met, the boy who smelled like burnt out cigarettes, shattered dreams and untold stories over countdown clocks. I will write about how I have never met a boy who smelled more like himself, even when he was unsure of his own existence. And on days when I will still ask myself why I don't want to head for my home, maybe I will understand then, that I don't have one, anymore. ~Sreyoshi Saha #Fanpost( storyteller via Heartbeats💕
