New SS: Starlight Express CLOSED Indefinitely - Page 26

Hanging in 😉 when are we getting the update?

Hasini, nothing can force me to do anything...not you, not anyone else...I'm like a stubborn mule 😆 Trust me, I'm commenting because I want to and what I've said has been in my mind for a very long time but you just gave me a chance to express it 😊

Originally posted by: 6thElement

Ok...Now I'm beating myself for initiating the topic last evening. 😳

I feel...
the whole act of commenting on this thread is somewhat strained now and being squeezed out of you folks.
I don't want to come across sounding as someone who has a problem at all times: when there were no comments and now when people make it a point to make their presence felt. (of course, I'm loving the latter 😊 )
I hope we are being ourselves and not pressured into writing a post for the sake of a troubled writer...We will try not to name this person for all intents and purposes (I have a index finger pointing down at me, to rightly orient you to the unnamed person 😆)

Have Fun folks. I will write once I go home and promise to post something tonight.

Hasini

Never think that you are forcing us...

I'm writing folks. But when under pressure, words evade me. Thanks Ucompleteme and Nirvana for going off like an alarm clock...😆

I will post Part 8 soon.

Hasini

It wasn't like him to skip office. Not when the new acquisition team was around perusing and negotiating the details that needed his overseeing. Instead he'd stretched himself on the park bench, one hand folded behind his head, with the glaze of the afternoon sun coating his skin as his feet hung limp beyond the tattered wooden bench that seemed to be in its last days. The cigarette he'd bummed from the hippie sitting nearby, lay loosely tucked in his hand and it did little to fire up the nerve cells in his brain, annihilated from the month long revolt he was staging against himself.

...himself...Abhinav wasn't himself any more for reasons that were beyond his fathom. Counting the number of break-ups he'd had since high school was still a mountainous task. His parents never minded where he was during those nights he didn't call to tell them he was staying out. Loaded with beer kegs, with unruly inebriated teenagers boarding his back seat he would drive around all night with the girl in the passenger seat drifting in and out of his lap every time they stopped at a diner or a rest area. It hadn't been reassuring by any standards when all the vain partying and hedonistic acts were swept into his twenties. And it had kept on until she'd walked into his living room, stilling the whirling storm that his life was.

Geet had come for a puja at his place with her aunt and it wasn't until later he'd discovered that it was an underhand attempt by their elders to have them meet. Much to his surprise, his parents were worried of his libertine ways after all. Her arrival threw him off the loop he was stuck in, like those dazed experiment mice that run on wheels lacking the will to stop. Just as that unyielding conviction he needed all along, she'd sat with a stiff back in the row ahead of him. When after the puja, everyone had moved to the dining room to grab food in the name of prasad, his mouth had released a gust of breath that he'd held inside without his knowing.

She was petite, he'd noticed, slender and soft with a dripping honey smile in the way that was untouched by the american living for all those years of Seattle upbringing. Her hair curled naturally and her eyes held a light that came with a plainness, defining her as the cachet that his empty life lacked.

Whatever it is she was made of underneath that porcelain skin of hers, he felt she could never handle him and for all the unrestrained effervescence he was, she was more contained for him. In his view she'd wanted him in her life for the very same reasons. There was something snug about that fit, like she was everything he was not, coupled as though his wayward drift settled perfectly as ridges against her inward flutes.

It fascinated him to watch her blink often, only smiling even at a laughable joke, hugging books on abstract themes with a stole going around her shoulders; her withdrawal only serving as his cue to nudge her out of her hiding place. At first she pulled out of his hold every so often, frustrating him enough to never try thinking of touching her in his dreams. But then there was a sparking charge, a stillness that spelled of surrender - so maddeningly satiating it was - that he lived for the moments she let him hold her lips in a tight slow kiss.

When his apartment smelled like rotten eggs and decaying garbage, hers was ever laced with lavender, with every room's corner exploding with glass vases of daisies, carnation and sweet pea. It was only obvious then, that he spent more time at her place, on her bed, watching her running around in the mornings only in her bra and underskirt, looking like a disturbed gypsy goddess, her lolling wild hair appearing to set off a black flame around her. She hated his friends, and it was again natural for him to avoid her conventional, hard up book club associates. And yet in the opposites they found an odd familiarity, a mirror of all qualities that they openly ridiculed but secretly desired. She was his order and he, her anarchy.

Everything spelt chaos between them - which to him felt like a stirred up version of his life - until his parents came to know of them being a couple; they were strident in their efforts to bring order to his life. Trouble began then, in the form of uncalled for pressure he faced from their end to make her his wife. It bothered him that she was being treated as a hunt that needed a big dramatic climax - which was to be their wedding. He liked the idea of spending his life with her, but not in the constitution of marriage. At least, he hoped, he didn't have to marry her early: within two years of meeting her. There was a deep conflict within him when he was pushed to make his claim on her; it violated some part of him that he couldn't understand then or now. He knew there was requisite sexual chemistry between them to set everything that came within inches of them to fire. And neither was staying loyal a problem. But love was. Partly he blamed love for the reasons it eluded him. It occurred to him that love floods you in the beginning, as if love is all that there is, and then as time passes by, it always turns out to be scant - never enough to go around for the rest of the life. Regardless of his dismissal of love, he eventually gave in, harboring his own doubts on his ability to keep up with other's wishes and partially to keep her happy.

Even as their engagement was made public, the searching inside him didn't come to a close. Something felt hidden to him - underneath those neat layers of the flux they were caught in. Whatever that was, it still lay behind the smoke screen of pain now; the knowledge of its presence sharply making an avowal with the heaviness he sensed there. He spent every waking minute paying utmost attention to his thoughts, disengaged from the outside word, waiting for it to make an appearance - rear its ugly head out to offer him the liberation, he sought. Despite the wait, he was fully aware; of the aggrievement that was making his body its home; a dullness flowing through his limbs thick as glue.

He got up from the bench and sat down, throwing the cigarette butt down and crushing it lazily. Though it hurt to move, he took a step in the direction of the Golden gate park entrance. With the same languid movement, came a small resolve to walk out of the madness that he'd taken up as his day and night job. If need be, he was going to cast himself away to an island with no one. But how could that ever be? When he was no island...She would be there too, right where she always was.

I'm out for the long weekend...So I doubt I will be updating. Have a good weekend folks!

After reading this update I can empathise with Abhinav, I don't blame him. He wanted a relation with her without the extra baggage of marriage...that sort of commitment would've come in its own time if it was not forced upon him.