BROKEN MAGIC (#1)

‘Darling, are you busy?’ Mark’s voice would’ve sounded normal to anyone who heard her, but Suzan knew better. Even over the phone, he could easily identify the emotions that she thought she concealed.

She was terrified.

‘You’re down the seventh alley again, love?’ It wasn’t a question. He framed it in such a way not to embarrass her.

He knew that she was terrified of dark abandoned places, and as fate would have it, she had to cross one on the way back to her apartment. He had noticed how she tightly held his hands and never spoke while they had to cross it together. He had noticed how she called him every time she had to cross it when he wasn’t with her, and how she brought up the strangest of subjects to pretend like it was casual talk.

Mark did not like being ridiculed for her irrational fears. Suzan knew that and he always played along. The only problem was that she had far too many irrational fears, and it made his acting a little complicated sometimes.

‘Umm…yea….’ She mumbled, and even through the phone, he could see the way eyes would’ve nervously shifted away from the dark sides of the road.

‘It’s okay, darling. I’m here with you, you’ll be fine.’ He said.

‘Oh no, I’m scared or anything,’ this was her pride talking. ‘I just wanted to ask you what time we’ll be meeting tomorrow. I’ve got my afternoon off.’

There it was. The deliberate and yet very obvious changing of subject. He was so used to her by then that she was starting to get easy to predict. He suppressed a laugh and told her to wait by the library where he would meet her.

He found himself smiling as he put the phone down and walked his way to the Library. The streets were damp from the rain, and there was hardly anyone around, making him only think about her a lot more than he wanted to. When he was Twenty three, he was looking for a girl who would be a star in his life. But when he saw Mark – he realised that he found an entire galaxy.

She was beautiful – not in the literal sense of the word.  She was beautiful for the way she thought, the way she removed herself from the chaotic crowds and slipped away into her imagination. She was beautiful in the way she patiently spoke about her deepest and truest of feelings in such carefully chosen words. She was beautiful for the way she let him fall in love with her, and for the way she held her soul and her body at a distance – completely aware of the distance between the two.

She had that day dream look in her eyes. Her full lips shone with the mild tint of colour that her vanilla scented lip balm. He was dazzled every time he looked at her, and accidentally bolted his eyes into hers, creating a connection that she quickly sensed and let it be.

When he first saw her, he wanted to lift her off her feet and just take her home.

He looked at her like she was the most precious thing that life had ever given him, and she looked up at him, like he was the world.

The night that Mark told Suzan she was struggling with happiness, was the most incomprehensible part of his life.

‘You’re worried, love?’ He said, his hands naturally intertwining into hers.

‘Yes.’ She mumbled.

‘But why?’ His fingers traced up her hands as he looked into her eyes.

‘Because I’m happy. I’ve never been this happy, and that is starting to freak me out.’ She refused to look into his eyes.

‘Darling, are you listening to yourself?’ He placed his hands over hers in tight assurance.

‘This is just another one of my irrational fears, I guess.’ She said rolling her eyes and turning her face away.

He removed his hands from her, releasing the tight grasp. This was heading out to somewhere serious, and he knew it.

‘What are you afraid of, exactly? Aren’t things more than fine, Mark? Do you get yourself depressed on purpose so that you can write a lot of stories?’  He vented.

‘You think I’m doing this on purpose, Suzan?’ She snapped. ‘How can you even say that? It’s not like I can control the way I feel, alright? I wish I could, but I can’t! You’re one of the best things that’s ever been mine, and look at you! You’re so kind, flawless and perfect. What if I lose you? What if you slip away from me? And what if destiny decides to play a cruel joke on us.’

Suzan could not take it anymore. He rose, and started venting out his feelings.

‘You know what your problem is? You are constantly worrying about everything that could go wrong and you keep drifting away from reality, from the present, and it’s starting to get tough for me to handle!’ He burst out.

‘Please, stop.’ Mark’s eyes were welled up with tears.

She looked at him – half fear and half anguish. Suzan’s heart melted again. He couldn’t bring himself into being mad at her for more than a minute.

‘Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s give it one more try.’ He breathed in, and replaced his hands over hers again. Sometimes, she was like a child. He needed a lot of patience in handling her.

‘What’s troubling you, love? What is it that you’re so afraid of?’ He enquired softly, careful not to scare her.

‘My biggest fear isn’t that you’ll lie to me or cheat on me. No. It’s not the usual threats to a relationship that come to mind when I think of us. It’s the fact that someday, all the magic will be gone and what’ll be left of us is the painfully boring ordinariness I was filled with before I met you. I’m afraid – no –scared to death that your currently deceiving eyes will lose the filters and look at my bare mediocre self, and I’m afraid you won’t be enchanted by me anymore.’ She said.

She broke down again. He was everything she had dreamed a guy to be like, and much more. The feelings she had for him, she had previously only encountered only between the pages of books. Or perhaps, that was what he actually was. A book written especially and only for her – a book she could not stop reading and the book she did not want to end. She wanted to read and read again with so many painful emotions and marveling thoughts – hoping she’d never hit the end.

‘You do know that all of this is too darn philosophical and deep for my simple intellect, don’t you?’ He asked her seriously.

She nodded amidst all the sobbing. He laughed and sat beside her, making her head rest on his shoulders and letting her cry while he enveloped her cold thin hands tightly inside the warmth of his.

‘Listen, Mark’ He said, taking her face in his hands and looking into her deep eyes with love and concern. ‘I want you. All of you. I’m not here only for your shiny sparkling self. I’m here for the whole package. I want your flaws, your mistakes and your imperfections. I want you, and only you.’

‘How did I get so lucky?’ Was all that she could manage to say.

‘See, I don’t believe in luck.’ He returned.

‘You don’t?’ She looked up, surprised.

‘Yeah.’ He said as he planted a kiss on her hands. ‘This isn’t luck. This is just exactly how it’s supposed to be.’

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and buried her face into his chest, listening to the rhythmic beat of his heart and letting it heal her soul. He held her, and held her – knowing that they could never have a hug long enough to suit them.

They were different. Probably the two most unlikely of people to have fallen in love.

She was a strange girl who said strange things. He was strange guy who did strange things. Only, their individual definition of strangeness varied greatly.

He was a simpleton. She was an eager thinker.

He was athletic and couldn’t be contained in a room for more than ten minutes, while she was a very indoor girl. He spoke four languages – all of them learnt in bits and pieces. She knew only two, but had mastered both.

He laughed hard at all the adult jokes and made several of them when with his friends, while she giggled and chuckled over Timon and Pumba.

She wrote vigorously – it was almost a compulsive obsession for her. Everything in her life had been written through. She had ten novels and over a hundred short stories all sitting idle on her desk.

Her life revolved around books. On the other hand, he was a guy who hadn’t bothered to even touch a work of fiction his life.

The differences that initially sounded classically romantic, soon turned out to be conflicts and intellectual mismatch.

He found her complex, impractical and tough to handle. She said, thought and did things he could not perceive.

She found him aloof, detached and not deep enough to fall for. But she did fall and she was still figuring out a way to make it the way she had dreamed it would be. Life with him was a cocktail of emotions. There were moments of peculiar delight, unchecked happiness and fearless affection. They held hands almost all the time, and when his warm hands weren’t over hers, she felt like something was missing.

But nothing worked. She was used to being single for the best part of her life.

She felt tied down by the suffocating shackles of commitment.