You

I’d almost forgotten that every story needs a protagonist. You can’t walk in and out of memories and weave the lost endings together. Cinderella gets eaten by the bad wolf and Rumplestilskin stamps his way down into the pretty glass coffin of a Sleeping Beauty. But I’m still blushing at the last message he sent me. And it is like I’m sixteen all over again. It has been so long. And I’m so damn tempted to reach out. I feel like I’m walking in and out of different lives. When I was little, I would spend hours ensuring that everything I had was colour coded. From Barbie to crayons, everything had a definite place. Because when you have a definite place, you belong somewhere. And when you belong somewhere, someone there will love you. And you will be happy. It is almost embarrassing how the equations pile up and I’m so aware of what I’m doing. Nothing much has really changed. Everything still has a place. But they are different places. So my heart lives nestled in memories of a yesterday which has been wrung so dry of realism that it feels like a part of an impossible dream. And I don’t quite know if I really was there. If his skin really felt that warm and if the grass was that moist.

She looked at me quizzingly through those damp brown eyes which I know so well. Why is it always the wrong guy? Because Prince Charming doesn’t come in a one size fits all range! Because he is scattered across so many damn guys that stringing them together is exhausting. Ever scraped sand out from under your fingernails and then dusted your shoes, hair, clothes and done the wet dog body shake, only to find more just when you crawl under the immaculate sheets in a far away hotel room? He is my sand, quite simply put. You think you’ve done all the right things, wiped everything clean and walk around with a safe smug smile, but then one nondescript flick of the head turns everything upside down. I can see it all so clearly even now. Like he was just here. In bits and pieces, which don’t add up. The dark eyes, dancing with mischief. The smile which makes me blush like a schoolgirl in pigtails. And I want to hear him say it all over again. Art imitates Life imitates Art. I’ve been over this so many times in my head. We’ve walked through moonlit groves on SMS and eaten bowl after bowl of ice cream to keep the night from ending. I think I’m starting to get confused now. I wake up and the room is dark and I’m not quite sure when he left. Or if he is still here. I find the bed too large and he feels stifled. As a six year old, I would prance around the house with the snowy white trail of imaginary wedding gowns. Impossibly intricate and laced with all the hopes and sighs of the years to come. When I was fourteen, I read about Miss Havisham. White never did look good after a couple of wears. Daag acche hai, is what he says. I want to throw something at him.

I am so many ‘me’s. Something like shape shifting. And they still think that I’m smiling at them. There are a couple of things that I picked up a while ago and the years of drag classroom lectures only perfected them. I could be sitting at my desk in my most perfect of all avatars and yet all I see before me are rolling green fields and an unreal blue sky. I’ve learned how to dance. In my dreams. Not the drunk excuses for the unabashedly Bollywood table-top performances, but the taunt with desire, almost war-like exhibition dances of the seventeenth century. I used eye make-up today. Just like with the contact lenses before, it just happened one day. And I think I’ve fallen hard this time round. I’d almost forgotten how good it feels to hold a damn pen again! I feel like the syllabus at Delhi University! There was the solitary seriousness of the ancients, the promise of the pre-Romantics, the young, wild and soon to be dead desperate talent of the later day Romantics and the stoic Augustan desolation. More often than not, it is down the rabbit hole. And I’m Alice all over again and the Queen of Hearts is shrieking. Off with their heads! I want to grab her annoyingly fast hands and hold them down, but I’m rooted to the ground. One minute I’m Alice and the next I’m her. And then I’m neither and I’m curled up watching the spectacle below. Is it because I have stopped caring? I ask myself this over and over again, with the fierce resolution to be honest. And I can’t find the answer. Is this hide-and-seek just because I’m lost? It started out like that. I couldn’t be happy where I was and with who I was so I looked for alternatives. When I lost him and it broke my heart but the tears just wouldn’t show, I think I drowned a part of me inside. And I looked elsewhere and then never stopped. No. I’m not searching for him anymore. In fact I don’t even allow myself to think about him anymore. But like everything that I hide from so desperately, the annoying tickers show up when you least expect them to. And the familiar heaviness starts forming in the pit of my stomach. The tears well up and I watch someone I will probably never know swing his daughter high up in the air.