Lines of Stillness

The dying sun glittered through the clouds even as the sky blushed at the sweetness of his parting kiss. A gentle wind knocked at her window pane, its whispers unheard as she bent over the paper, her hand moving evenly as she filled it with the black irregular lines. Lines that began at a loose end of her mind and ended at some forgotten point in time. Lines that were stacked close, each following the other in an almost spiritual trance as her hand moved over the paper calmly, methodically with a mechanical precision.

Lines of stillness, she had called them when he had once asked, turning the pages in her notebook, his eyes tinted with incredulous amusement.

“They engage the sensible part of me” she had explained “these magic lines”

“They trick my senses into guiding the journey of the pen in my fingers, leaving a beautiful, musical silence behind.   A magical peace that awakens a deeper, irrationally lucid self in me.  Have you ever known the freedom of a million thoughts that spring out of thoughtlessness?” She’d asked.

He had only smiled slightly and lit yet another cigarette, blowing rings of smoke that lingered doubtfully in the air.

She smiled to herself as she put away her pen, looking at the plain white paper now filled with horizontal lines that crawled on it like worms. Every curve on the body of every streak painted with a bit of her soul.

A Cuckoo sang from its mysterious perch in the distance. A cry of loneliness, she thought as she opened the window and sang back to it, letting in a little bit of the early monsoon. Cold fingers of rain tapped against her outstretched palm, raindrops glinting at the tips of her fingers.

Black vertical lines like threads of rain, she thought as she drew them over the worms of horizontality.

Do they hurt like they did on that rainy day as she sat behind him in his noisy bike as the raindrops pelted on her soft skin?  She had smiled through the angry rain that day as they stood in the tiny thatched tea shop blowing on hot cups of tea in steel tumblers.

Was it then that he had locked his fingers in hers and told her that he was lost in her land of dreams?  Would she teach him the subtle art of levitation, for he was so weary of living amidst the laboriously banal world….Would she draw him into a magical reverie?

A criss-cross of lines, she looked at her paper, much like broken dreams, she thought.  

To be continued....