Wednesday evenings

He often used to wonder how each day, although the same, felt so different when it was tagged with its characteristic name. A name, which sketched a face and associated emotions with each day. From the grumpy, old, sleepy-headed Mondays to the lazy, joyous, gift wrapped Sundays. You knew what the gift was, but the childlike excitement of tearing the silky glossy paper, of untying the bright red ribbon – that was the real present that each Sunday bought with itself.

Wednesdays were his Sundays. And she was the gift that each Wednesday evening bestowed upon him. Gift wrapped in the colours of twilight. And nature unwrapped her presence in its own artistic ways, by playfully splashing the colours of her arrival on the canvas of his mind. Sometimes a melancholy grey, sometimes a vibrant blue, and sometimes a flirtatious combination of flared up orange and a lacy pinkish red.

The cathedral, the coffee shop, the small town market – they all leaned in and listened to her as her voice gave shape to her innocent thoughts. He sat there, stirring his coffee, tracing his fingers in the palm of her hand, nodding reflectively, occasionally plugging in a witty joke and prodding her with a frequent “And then?..” – always wishing that the tower clock would never strike 9. And when it did, he held her eyes in his, telling them to stay back, if only for a while. She wanted to, but if she stayed back late, they’d know that the she was upto it again. And so, his eyes let go of hers and they let go of each other. Their goodbyes were marked by a silent promise of a reunion.

But his fairy tale was too good last. A few months went by in a dreamy haze and on one fateful day everything changed. After what happened, Wednesdays still came, but their face morphed from that of a gift bearing friend to a sickle wielding fiend. The beautiful face of those Wednesday evenings was mercilessly torn off from his life and strewn across the path of fate, where the cruel stampeding stallions of time disfigured it beyond recognition under their galloping hoofs. And now, all that was left of that face was the searing pain of its unhealed wounds.

Watching her jostle through the crowd with her dead, steady gaze at no one in particular made his ordeal all the more unbearable. One wouldn't believe that this woman, who looked as if she was tightly wrapped in a shroud of gloom with her pale, wrecked face and those brooding, sleepless eyes, once held everyone captive by her immaculate dressing sense and her lady like charm. Dragging her feet upto that coffee table, she used to stare at it with a deadpan expression which betrayed every human emotion. And after a while, she walked away from it, occasionally looking back, hoping to steal a moment out of time.

He tried to talk to her but his words hit nothing. He tried telling others to drive some sense in her, to tell her that it was over but they too, like her, ignored him. It was his cross to bear. Her ignorance he could tolerate, for that was a part of his fate, what he couldn't see was what she was doing with her life. She refused to move on. He wished she would. But her mind was peering into the dark abyss of hopelessness and her withering sanity wasn't doing much to prevent her from plunging into those depths from where there was no coming back.

After a few months, she stopped coming. He once sneaked in to her place and saw that she was coming to terms with life. It felt as if she made peace with time. That relieved him to some extent. But he didn’t change. He couldn't change. Years went by but he still came to the very same spot, and stared out at the horizon till night crept in and engulfed the twilight. And then he went back to where he came from, unknown to this world, irrelevant to anyone’s life. He didn't matter to anyone and no one mattered to him. He couldn’t let go. Even if he wanted to. Time didn't stop. Neither did he.

One such evening, before he was about to disappear again into the night, he saw a familiar gait in the distance. It was her.

She walked up to him and smiled that same pleasant smile – one which always seemed to make the twilight last a little longer.

“Hi”, she said.

To know that a voice was directed at him, to feel that what he said would be heard again, to believe that he wasn't alone now – a combination of these feelings was so unknown, so overwhelming for him that he didn’t know what to say.

“Hi…but… how.. and wh.. when?”, he stuttered.

“A few hours ago. Multiple organ failure. Natural reasons. After 80, I started realizing that it isn’t worth the struggle.”, she replied, looking at him as fondly as she used to in those good old days.

He had regained his composure by now. She was new to this phase. He had to comfort her.

“Was it fatal?”, he questioned her jokingly.

She ran her hand through a passerby and watched it as it went right through him.

“I guess it was.”, she replied in the same lighter vein and ran her hand playfully through a few others in the crowd, making a whooshing sound everytime she did it.

“You’ll get bored of it soon. So.. how does it feel to be old? Not that you look old; he told me that when we meet again, we’d be just the same way we parted.”, he told her.

“It’s sort of like being invisible. Only that you know that they can see you, but they choose not to.”, she replied with a sigh.

“That’s some perspective. So, you want to lie down in my grave for the night? Yours won’t be dug up for quite some time.”, he quipped. He had been saving up that joke for quite some time.

“Creepy, yet commendable. I see that your sense of humor is still alive.”, she said, amused by his way of looking at afterlife.

“Some things in life are too good to die.”, he told her meditatively.

“And some, totally worth dying for.”, she replied as she took his hand in hers and pressed it against her cheek. He felt the warmth of her touch mingled with the moistness of her tears.

Wednesday evenings were back again. Forever.