One Shot: Writer's Block
"It has been six years since we are trapped here" sighs Geet, stuck at what she had been doing the last thing, at the terrace, on the swing, painting her toenails.
"In the terrace? I thought it's been six months" Maan adds faking ignorance.
"I am talking about the story" she scowls darkly. "When is she going to start writing again. I am tired of this pull and push game."
"Really?" he says grinning, taking a seat next to her.
They both were mere puppets, in the hands of a master writer. They had grown along with her, their thoughts shaping as their writers' had shaped, dark clouds looming over in their world, when the writer had a heartbreak; all nice and rosy happening to them, when the writer fell in love.
Six years to the day their story have been conceived, they stay here, hanging out together in the imaginary city there were set in, frozen in the place they are left last by the writer.
They have come to like each other a bit, since they were around for a longer time, and had actually seen each of them shape, and also because they were stuck in these interludes, whenever their writer has a block.
"You want our story to end, just like that?" he asks, uncharacteristically. He was sketched as a cynic and his partner, the eternal believer, but staying along with each other for a long time, they started to toe their lines.
"I wish for it to start again. It gets to me to sit here, waiting"
"Maybe she had been going through stuff"
"That she had. Off late, she had been writing about another couple, to keep her mind off things"
"Oh, we have a competition? How are the other couple"
"Bleh. They can't hold a candle next to us" she says shrugging "Heard she sketched them to be more normal. Not like us. Ours was supposed to be an eternal love story. Theirs seems to be a slice of life"
"Okay" he says, his eyebrows snapping into thinking lines "That is a bad sign. You know that right?"
"Because they are easy to write, and have closure before we do?"
He shook his head at her naivete. Sometimes he wondered how come the writer sketched her so naive.
"No, because she had moved on from a teenager's expectations of how stories are supposed to be, to an adult's experience of how real stories are. What if she never comes back to us?"
She looked out of words for a bit. Then, she smiled a small smile.
"She is meant to come back to us"
"And why is that Miss. Optimistic?" he asks.
"Because we are her first love, and one can't forget their first love that easily"
He stares at for a moment and smiles, although he manages to rile her up by flippantly commenting "No wonder you stemmed out when she was young and lame" he says.
"So are you" she shots back.
"I am her expectations. You are a part of her"
And so they get back to their bickering selves, while the author stirs in her sleep, dreaming of a story she had put on writer's block, finding a sudden inspiration...
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