How to Drown

I noticed her because of the way she held the book she was reading in the metro. Not only was she the only other person reading a book in the entire cabin, but she also held it differently. I was hunched over, my right fist rolled up under my chin, my neck bent and my double chins digging into myself. It's when my neck started giving me a crick that I snapped up and saw her across me, her book held high in her left hand, her head tilted up and tilted towards her right and the book covering her entire face. She tapped her feet absently, while she read and while it might have been distracting in itself, at that moment, I found it entirely captivating. And my heart raced surprising me.

I must have made a sound, or maybe her hands were tired from holding her book up, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, which I had read and abandoned the month it had won the Booker.

And she looked straight at me. Her eyebrows lifted up as if in surprise and looked at me, and by look, I do not mean the look a stranger gives a fellow passenger who seems to be in the process of unapologetically cataloging every bit of your appearance, but when she looked at me from across her seat in the almost crowded metro train while I was on my way back home after a usually ordinary day at work, I immediately wanted to be hugged by her and confess every single thought that had begun flashing across my usually dormant fuzzy brain cells.

I wanted to tell her that I had always wanted curly hair like hers and that I hated the milk moustache I got when I drank rosemilk straight from the glass, and that apple cinnamon was my favourite scent for a room freshner and that I had once stolen a book from my school library and torn off the first page that had the school seal to hid that fact that it was stolen but then discovered that the school also stamped it's seal on random pages and so my copy of the Five Run Away Together has pages 22, 37 and 53 missing and I never knew what exactly happened to make George so angry with Anne in page 37.

I also wanted to tell her that I don't remember my mother hugging me ever but that I knew I gave the best hugs to my friends. I wanted to tell her that I was seriously considering accepting my colleague's offer of marriage although I was not in love with him, but because I was getting really lonely these days after the death of the stray who had adopted me and moved into my home and taken over my heart and although I wasn't a dog person at all, Sheeru's death had made me seek grief counselling for the first time ever in my thirty three years of existence.

I wanted to tell her that at that moment, I was wondering what it would be to kiss her lipstick free lips with my own blood red ones.

I wanted to tell her that maybe I had known her in another life, another her and another me. I wanted to tell her that my palms were sweating and that I couldn't remember it happening to me ever although I had read about it in the books that I read.

I wanted to tell her that I...

The metro glided into the station, she got up, carefully placed a book mark on the page she had last read, got up and walked out of the sliding doors without a glance at me and I sat in the train and got out at the last station where I was detained for travelling ticket less for the last five stops and I knew that I could have gotten down with her, because that had been my stop too.