Four Years Later. . .

I was dressed in colours. Bright colours. Sunshine yellow and lime green and burnt orange and summer-sky-blue all amalgamated in the graphical print of my kurta, which I'd paired with basic jeans. I looked good, I thought, the colours went well with my fair skin. Plus, I had my favorite dangling earrings on and my hair left loose, which added to my confidence.

Yet, watching you from a distance, I was nervous too. It was a strange feeling to be apprehensive and assured all at once. Perhaps it was a sign of how I would go on to always feel strange around you, how you would always evoke in me two polar opposite emotions simultaneously, two extreme intensities at once: ease and tension, peace and conflict, comfort and pain, happiness and sorrow, love and hate, desire and disgust.

My friends egged me on:

"Go on and talk to him."

"Come on, you can do it. You MUST do it!"

"He's all by himself. It's a rare perfect moment. Go!"

"Go, go!"

And I did go. But alas, what would I say? I had no idea yet some unknown force propelled me forward, towards you.

You were wearing black. It really suits you, in my opinion. What happens when colour meets black? It stands out I guess, initially, refusing to blend. But gradually, black takes over. Black always takes over, just like evil, engulfing the colours into its unfathomable depths to become blacker, deeper, darker. It was all symbolic, I suppose, but I was too distracted, preoccupied, crazed to notice. Too engrossed, overwhelmed, possessed by the million thoughts running through my head so fast I couldn't hear any of them, by the rush of blood I could feel coursing through my veins, by the abnormal thumping of my heart, by the way my insides were squiggling, in excitement and fear and something else, longing perhaps.

You looked up as I approached. And you smiled. And that was it: The beginning of the next four years of my life. I was besotted. Completely, utterly, madly, irrevocably, head-over-heels besotted by you, the boy I knew nothing about.

We exchanged pleasantries. And small talk. But it felt like the best, most special, most significant, most memorable, most cherished conversation I had ever had. Never before had I paid so much attention to a voice. Or noticed the minutest details of a pair of eyes. Or liked the look of a rugged, manly hand. Never had I fallen in love like this before. And who knows if I ever will again, in quite the same free-falling, reeling, knock-the-air-out-of-me, exhilarating way?

For four years later...

"You're still on my mind.

Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?

Who holds the stars up in the sky?

Is true love just once in a lifetime?

Did the captain of the Titanic cry?

Oh, Someday we’ll know

If love can move a mountain

Someday we’ll know

Why the sky is blue

Someday we'll know

Why I wasn't meant for you...

Someday we’ll know

Why Samson loved Dalilah?

One day I'll go

Dancing on the moon

Someday you’ll know

That I was the one for you..."

And it will be too late then. :P