They all ran for cover. Everything around was getting gray…something somewhere was gurgling…thunderbolts flashed on the  horizon… sensing there could be an outpour, all my feelings ran for cover and hid themselves under my irredeemable smile.

A ‘captivating’ smile – someone years ago had mentioned. But what remained captive underneath that smile of mine were all these feelings which, after the need to smile was over, traveled right up to my heart and ripped it open while I bled and stared into the immeasurable darkness of what seemed like an endless night.

During those nights, even when the only thing I could see was the flashy orangey blurry inside of my eyelids, I saw us. And it appeared real. Actually, much better than real. Because reality, really isn’t the most wonderful thing on earth. Other than when reality was the times I saw people embrace.

I have this thing for embraces. Not the ones that happen before people are parting…but the ones which take place when people are uniting – triumphant at the end of longing. I find it amazing how impatient people are, to reunite with the ones they love…they run towards them and grab them…embrace them like they are ‘unletgoable’…and the sobbing and the crying and the swaying in the arms that ensues. But most of all, I love the companionable, comfortable silence that exists while two people embrace. And how in that divine silence both can hear every forbidden secret, feel every unspeakable grief and revere every latent delight of past and present and future, color every sunset and  paint every sunrise,  warm every winter…charm every summer, and bring an end, with an immediacy I’m pressed to call ‘ridiculous’, the vicious incompleteness of the other. Call me an embrace-o-philiac, but I love seeing two people embrace. I love it more when two people embracing are us.

I spent many days and nights imagining those embraces.   I had to imagine because they didn’t happen as often in reality. I imagined embraces those were stolen – truncated…so hurried that they disappeared as quickly as the trail of a cigarette smoke mingles and vanishes in air …embraces that  were earned – unrestrained…so unswerving that they lingered, like memory of a full-bodied wine does in a connoisseur’s  mouth…and then, there were those embraces, that remained unreturned.

Hanging in midair. Like children dangling their feet sitting on a tall parapet.

Embraces suspending in space. For no one to claim.

I imagined such embraces too.

Those embrace, where only one set of arms raised itself…only one heart unlocked itself and only one soul bared itself. Embraces, those left a livid flutter inside me and a possible guilty flicker inside you. The ones that made me embrace air, as if it were you.

Such were the times when everything around would turn gray and all my feelings would run for cover. A cover that could become a smile as to beguile faux imperviousness or could become a fabric as to conceal my naked and maddened equilibrium depending upon the degree of flutter I labored.

The smiles worked most summers…but winters? Well, winters needed ‘clothing’.

 The unreturned embraces introduced me to an entirely new world of fabrics.  A world of fabrics - of the lesser known feelings.

Subtle embroidery of guilt…flimsy, but encompassing lining of betrayal…delicate lacing of bewilderment and burnished sequins of hurt… all this weaved perfectly into the crimson filament of suicidal indignation made this fabric.

A fabric of majestic despair spun from the ungodly, Manja like, yarn of my being. A fabric, which I’d cut with an obsessive accuracy and later, tailored with an infuriated perfection into a dress.  It gave my abject madness a method, a structure. A dress that embraced me when I was denied embraces. A dress that held me up when everything inside me felt broken.

Wearing the dress, made me… numb and afraid and melancholic…or maybe an abysmal cocktail of all…the kind I had known less of.

This cocktail, like a chemical catalyst, reacted to my blood and produced ink. Ink, which simply wanted to spell out words I was trying to hide behind. On most of these ‘cocktail’ nights, a storm would arrive in my mind…it would visit the graveyard of my memory and conscientiously pick up tiny little pieces I had buried long ago…it would topple me upside down in a chaotic whirlwind filled with ashes of what I had burnt in history and would toss me in a state of retrograde outrage.

On those nights, I would let myself bleed.

Soil the dress. With ink. Through words.

I would let my thoughts out. I’d let them roam in some random streets of some random city…to free them to have a cup of coffee with a crisp baguette at a dimly lit French bakery…to let them find a victim of their choice. And when I did that, my thoughts never came back to my mind…they settled wherever they visited. However, as a souvenir, they sent demons to give me company. And when demons would come, I’d freeze with fear, of utter darkness. A darkness, in which I could lose myself…in which I could find you…in which, most of the times, I found you only to lose you. Yet, I’d summon you. Write invisible messages on the wall with my naked fingertips. Ask you to embrace me. And you, there, in sheer darkness, you’d embrace me back. Like I had earned it. With your touch, my dress would evaporate miraculously. You’d rescue me from the demons. Fight the night out. And lie with me…forehead to forehead…nose to nose…skin to skin. You’d hold me until next morning. Until when the daylight would replace my empty embrace. Until when a fresh tear will find its way down a dried lambent trail from last night. Until when a burning need to pull off a smile will spark off. Until when I’d break further…with you…without you…within you.

Sorrow, however, unlike beauty or the absence of it, wasn’t skin deep.

Now I imagine the day when all this will happen. When our souls would scatter into a million fibers, when we shall cry – bitterly but consolably and our tears won’t guard the secret of the agony our fabric contains, when we shall get lost and bedazzled by the variety of fibers we contain and when our fibers would embrace each other and we’d find it difficult to tell them apart.

I imagine a summer day when we’d lose us in each other and you and I – we - will come along to find us.