I thought of you again today. I have to admit, this time you dropped by after quite a while. And it was actually the story of two strangers that reminded me of you. Sometimes I wonder if this is all you will ever be – a memory drummed up sporadically by random triggers. It’s hard to believe that there was a time when you made it difficult to breathe or think or see or eat or sleep or even swallow my pride. It’s hard to imagine a time when nothing else made sense except you when, in fact, you never really fit into my scheme of things. 

Our story is like a flash in the pan idea that’s perfect only inside a writer’s head and once transferred on to paper, in black and white, it starts to fumble and fall apart. The points at which it should be taut, tense and absorbing are now just loose ends of a flimsy plot. It’s like the writer has suddenly been rendered useless and inarticulate after a sudden blow to the head, spewing out incoherent words that were once ethereal and sublime, like the rich reflection of sunlight on snow-kissed mountains. That's how we started out -- pulsating and poetic. Like the first time I noticed your invasion into my consciousness and you introducing me to this thing we call the heart. And the first time I realized how even crinkling brown eyes could unravel my soul. Like the first time I watched your slender fingers pluck those strings and then felt them map out your desires along the contours of my neck. And the first time I felt your strong arms over my shoulder, perfectly locking us into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Like the first time you imprinted my skin with your rich cocoa touch just before the beginning of the end. And the first time I noticed the moistness in your eyes and the delicate quiver on your lips, the ones I have never tasted.

So, it had to end before it began because it was as half-baked and incomplete as a story that falls short in execution and definitely shy of completion. Unrequited love they say is the sweetest of all, despite being the most painful. But what about incomplete love? A love that takes off in tandem to the lovers’ heartbeats but doesn’t quite reach the end or even the middle or even the end of the beginning. A love that’s carried to term inside the fertile womb of imagination but arrives stillborn. And yet, it’s a love that continues to breathe and grow inside the minds of its makers simply because they don’t know how to abandon it. 

Perhaps some stories will be perfect just as long as they remain unwritten.