Perhaps their separation had begun long before they met. What one lacks is what he seeks in others, they say. They both lacked the same thing—the ability to look out of themselves. They were lost, so lost within themselves they never quite saw each other clearly and never realized they weren’t meant to be together.
Or, perhaps, they began to part when he first saw her standing in front of a painting he couldn’t understand and smiling to herself. Those thin lips painted in red lipstick parted slowly and she moved her tongue over them to keep them wet. She didn’t have the finest set of teeth but that didn’t matter. What was most beautiful was her nose—long and round. He immediately felt he was in love but didn’t know that he wasn’t. But it was meant to happen. It was a very beautiful co-incidence. He never actually wanted to come to the exhibition; he had just accompanied a friend there. So he asked, or rather begged, his friend who claimed to know her personally to make them acquainted. He was soon rewarded when, at the party of a mutual friend, they were finally introduced to each other.
It was her turn now to fall in love. What a rightly put phrase falling in love is because when one falls they are bound to get hurt. And it was all set for her. She admired art from paintings to literature and even music, and he was a poet. Well, only an aspiring poet, but he knew enough beautiful sentences to win a woman’s vulnerable heart. They struck up liking to each other, fixed dates and met regularly until they were completely blinded by the illusion of being in love.
So it began—their separation.
Or maybe it was the time when they had their first kiss. The kiss changed something inside them. When they felt each other’s tongue probing into their mouths exchanging the saliva, they let their boundaries dissolve and handed themselves over to the other. Perhaps it was too early to jump to conclusions, for when the kiss ended their world was restored to normal. The storm was followed by calm and long silence and awkwardness then apology and then an assurance that what happened was mutual and then another more passionate and tender kiss. So it wasn’t the kiss, then. But they should have stopped there because what was to follow would result in rather unpleasant and undesired results for them.
They transcended into each other’s life completely when on a hot summer afternoon they lay naked together—he on top of her. All covered in sweat, they struggled to drive pleasure from each other’s body. The love was in partial replaced by lust and the control over one’s self was completely relinquished. After few more such encounters, the sacredness of the act had demeaned. They no longer were the only thing in each other’s life. Other things mattered and they mattered even more now.
They began to retreat into their individual lives. She had to attend exhibitions, concerts and literary festivals. He was busy searching words and avoiding people. The illusion began to dwindle and they could see in each other the image of their own. They were one and the same: they both lacked the same thing and they both desired same thing from the other. It wasn’t that they didn’t achieve anything, but what they got they could have found in anyone else—a few good conversations, some moments of laughter, few sessions of love-making. At the end, it proved to be a costly bargain after all—spending precious moments of their lives on something that would eventually bruise their hearts. The separation had created a vacuum in their lives that could be filled only by someone absolutely meant for them. They learned to recognize their own dreams, desires and needs, which would help them choose the right person next time, before they separate.
editor's note: A few devils are in each human being, they dwell in the hips and in the heart, and no matter what we can blame on them, each one of us still loves them. Inside out, others see who we are in spite of what our flesh says, it always boils down the desires of internal devils, but they’re nothing compared to the wicked heart and its passion for artistic isolation and perfect destruction. The internal destroys the external silently, in front of paintings or over a page of poetry, again and again. - tm
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