Rachel

She was late by 25 minutes. This was unexpected. So I smiled at myself for being wrong about her. The last time I saw her three months back, she was the 'Mother India' concept personified for me. Ironically it was equally good and bad to know I was wrong.

She'd understand the Mother-India pun if she ever reads this.

Connaught Place has been an amazing place for first (and last) meetings. You both'd be like two souls lost amidst a thousand more, trying to steal a moment or two of existential solace. And so we walked on, equally clueless about where to encapsulate the few billion microseconds of togetherness to follow.

Cafe Coffee Day it was. Tropical Iceberg, Choco Frappe and White Pasta it was. She was wrong again when she said we'd find peace. I wont't tell her this though.

Struggle in the tune of the music in a whirlpool of loud murmur pained my throat. But we talked. I pretended to be busy relishing the pasta as she looked around, and I looked at her, stealing more glances than I should have, and thought about how she existed in pieces of contradictory dipoles - the alpha of mystic philosophy and the omega of ruthless materialism.

I have no clue if she even listened to what erupted off an inexplicable spontaneity of memories of college times - of the story in flesh and blood of a struggle for IIT (BHU) conversion, of finding unexpected first love and endeavouring its preservation amidst difficult times. About faith and the art of war with one's own internal motivation and translated action.

And so I stopped talking. For she was a poem of an incomprehensible figurative art. And my words were dwarfed by the secret monologue of my internal mind...

She'd be like childhood horror stories - the more I read the more lost I'd be. And she'd be long gone before I move past the fundamental premise of the consciousness she is. 

So I let go of the rein snatched from hands of time, and looked at the digital hours and minutes in the supine of my mobile phone screen, simulating our Goodbye as imaginary seconds ticked in incremental silence. It was her resplendence to bent the curve of time and space which stayed behind as she left as an incomplete prose with a perfect expression in the back of your mind, but no material ink to cast a scintillating mysticism of perspective in a framework of comprehensible emotion.

A conspiracy of capturing concluding microseconds before Goodbye rendered me much akin an unprepossessing drug abused. Cocaine overdose I'd say.