Where No One Dies..

The bland room didn't give anyone any ideas. The walls were white, plain white and the paint was peeling off at some parts showing the pale brown cement. The wallpaper wasn't much better. It stuck to various parts of the wall, and would feel off with almost no force. Constant rain had turned the ceiling damp, and the previously whitewashed ceiling was currently grey. In short, he hated the room.

He always linked his hatred of the room to the way it was structured. The only furniture in the room was a termite-eaten wooden table which was missing a leg. His bed, if you could call it, was a bundle of nylon ropes, a thin sheet for a bedspread, and a hook on the wall where he hanged his shirt before going to bed. On a far corner of the wall was a small piece of paper, which had miraculously survived the destruction that the room had been through. The writing on it had faded quite a bit, but if looked closely, one could still make out the words. It read, "When it rains, it pours."

It was ironic, really, that the only piece of advice his father had given him was on the day he died. He had always looked up to his father. He had eyes which were a spectacular shade of grey, so grey that one could see the emotions swimming in those orbs. It was, therefore, highly unfortunate, that his father didn't possess emotions. He was a man of steel, and moved from one place to another with an insurmountable optimism that one day life would look up to him. Life did look up to his father, and that's when he felt the first drops of rain on his shoulders. After that, his father had been a man who had one primary function in life: 'Work.' Not that he was a heartless father, no, it just took him a long time to figure out that his father did have a heart. Yet still today, he had his father's souvenir, the white piece of paper with the five words written on them that he had taken to heart.

Being a tremendous pessimist all through his life, he had taken those five words to heart. Pessimism was something that seemed to run in his bloodline. Not only his father, but as far as he knew, his family had been pessimists all along. When he was fifteen, he was gifted the whole collection of books by Nietzsche on his birthday. It had been a family heirloom, apparently, and as his father put it, it was their "key to success." He had read those books, each and every one of them, meticulously and carefully so that the old and yellowing pages won't be torn. A first read of some of his books had brought out a side of him that he didn't know he had. Those books made him feel good about himself, because they related to him. It gave him a strange sort of satisfaction to read that someone else's life had been in even more jeopardy than his own. Like the rest of his family, he had taken Nietzsche to his heart. It was on his fifteenth birthday that he had felt the rain falling heavier and faster, but then he had thought Nietzsche was his umbrella.

It always made people wonder how the son of such a well-established person had ended up in a white room with practically nothing but a piece of paper. It made him wonder too. On the nights when he couldn't fall asleep, it made him wonder just how exactly had he ended up in this position. But sleep always overcame him at that point, and he was never sure the next morning whether he had been dreaming or not. Sometimes, the big mansion, the beige walls, his father's classic tailored suit, and the strict routine of "make an appointment, then speak" seemed a dream to him too. But then he woke up with a start, and faced that piece of paper, and kept on convincing himself that he was not, in fact, dreaming. He could never understand the logic behind it all, so he ignored it completely.

"Dinner is ready." He turned around at the hesitant voice. That woman was standing there again, and looking at her wiping her hands on her apron, he grimaced. It didn't matter that he didn't have his wealth anymore, he still cared about formality. He saw that woman once a week, or maybe once in two weeks, he didn't remember, but it was only because of his irrepressible need to consume soup. The woman could be pretty, he grudgingly gave in, if she put on a cleaner pair of clothes and maybe cleaned herself up. He looked at her eyes, and was almost shocked to the very core. She was very much like himself. Her orbs were grey, or was it green, his eyesight wasn't the best anymore. But one thing was crystal, they were raining too. Somewhere, inside her eyes, there was a huge storm brewing, and the first drops of rainfall had already begun. He didn't even know her name, but he couldn't stop staring. Not that she made a very good first impression, and neither had he ever seen her smile, but somehow he could not stop staring..

"What's your name?" he whispered softly to her, his own voice sounding appalling to his ears. Her face was startled for a moment by his whisper, since it was the first time he had ever talked to her.. "Naina." She whispered back to him, even though she had no idea why she was using the same voice.

"Really?" his voice was so low, that she could barely hear it. It was through sheer lip reading, that she understood what he was saying. She nodded, and he continued, "It means eyes. You have beautiful eyes too, they rain." She seemed to understand what he was saying, because she didn't move away, merely closed her eyes. It took a moment of hesitation, but he slowly moved his hand forward to tuck a stray piece of her hair which had fallen on her forehead. It was an instinct or a motive, he couldn't say, but she looked up at him.

It was at that moment that he knew that he had the permission to kiss.

The rain stopped.