I Close All Doors Behind Me

I Close All Doors Behind Me
I paused for a while at the doorstep of my house before I left for the formal ceremony. I wanted to give an ear to the delicate sound of her heartbeats. There was a message encrypted in every heartbeat, and I wanted to hear  all of them. They wanted to call me back, they wanted me to pause at the threshold I stood at, they didn’t want me to move on; there was a typical selfishness ingrained in their call, but I was not in a position to go back now. It was too late. I don’t think I was ever in a position to pay heed to her heartbeats.

They articulated the four-lettered word in their typical format, and they were interpreted in the exact manner they were meant to be perceived by me. I was aware I was an audience to some of the closest kept secrets in the world. There were many more secrets buried deep in the ocean of secrets, but I was elated when I got to know of the one relevant to me. One of the greatest joys I have known is of the belief that I’m being loved by someone. I have been loved as a son and as a brother, but this was a typical joy of being loved in a different form by someone else.

It sent me to paradise when I realised the depth of the emotion she held in her heart for me. There were many waves in the ocean buried in her chest, and each wave whispered a typical secret whenever it touched the shore. There were certainly a whole lot of secrets buried in the bed of the ocean, quite a few floated on the surface and were brought to the shore by the waves, and yet a lot of them remained buried in the ocean-bed. Not all of them could be extracted using the best oil-drill. A lot of them lay a lot deeper than the point any drill could ever reach.

A lot of secrets had accumulated in her heart since she was a little princess. Young girls harbour secrets in their hearts they don’t share even with their mothers, and I felt sure her heartbeats articulated all of them. The little princess had come a long way from her teenage and infancy, and she had a completely different set of secrets in her heart now. Her heart beat wildly when it reverberated with the sound of the best kept secret: I knew her strongest kept secret: she loved me.

There were some deeper  and darker mysteries she wanted to share with me when she parted with me that day. An expert diver was required to fish them out, but I don’t know how to swim. I felt sure I was going to be an audience to some secrets she had not shared with anyone.

I was all ears to see through the heart of a woman when she wanted to see me for a while that day, when she suddenly changed her mind. She simply turned around and never came back. She walked away leaving me looking at her absent form like she were all there. All of a sudden, it attracted a lot more attention than the concrete form that had been there a little while back. I  completed the void she had left behind herself with her thoughts.

They were a lot more animated than the physical form they had replaced. There was a hint of the early dawn in her face, but I replaced it with a cacophony of emotions vibrant with all colours of a rainbow she was bubbling with. She began the day with an affirmation of her affection for me, and it made my day all the more bright and gay, but she had also affirmed that we were never to see each other again. This was what the meeting had been all about. Apparently, she had found someone better than me.

I badly wished I could do something concrete at that time, but the only possible action at that time was a raised eyebrow. I did raise both of my hands in dismay, I’m sure everyone around me guessed something is wrong with me, but I couldn’t possibly do anything more than this. I felt like tearing off my clothes in disgust and dismay, but I couldn’t do anything of the sort considering the impropriety of the proposition.

She had become  a lot to me over the past few weeks of our acquaintance, and her exit from my conscious self was going to be felt quite deeply within me. This was to be one of the biggest losses of my life unless I was compensated for it in a particular format.  I was determined not to let it ruin my entire life, after all, many more episodes are to come, but I pledged not  to entertain another failure in my life again. There isn’t a way of guessing the end when you begin, but I am determined not to fall in love ever again. I badly wish there was  a way I could possibly show her that her exit is not the end of the world for me.

My world became animated in a different format soon. I got into full regalia and did step beyond the threshold of the house leaving her with her heartbeats behind me.

I closed the door behind me.