Rewritten

Part I - Unwritten

Part II - Rewritten

There are these mornings when you step out of the bath and have your hair eerily smell of him. And this, with the smokiness of his smell alive in your shampoo. How does that happen, I have no clue, but I believe that smell makes a man. Smells help you remember people, especially those you've met only a few times and have happened to draw too close for comfort. Of course, I am not talking of people -I am talking of him, whom I had tried to breathe in via the cup of Earl Grey. Too close for comfort. At this nervous proximity, features dissolve and olfactory senses takes over. Do you remember your breath quickening the last time he touched you - not with his touch, but his vulnerabilities? The classic search and yearning for your own, personal Byronic protagonist takes over all senses - and ridiculous, smoky smells become enticing. Smoke is addictive, they said. Its bad, but addictive. So perhaps is he. And I still say perhaps.

The initial impact is always the strongest - matched in intensity by a brackish wave crashing against your senses to leave you psychologically and emotionally uprooted, with little premonition left of the good and the bad, the right or the wrong. You're submerged, and you might even begin to enjoy the floating, light sensation, scarce reflecting on the fact that in moments the salty, scratchy liquid would have entered your nostrils, choking you; your eyes, burning you; and your heart, stopping you. You're not floating, you are drowning. But do you still fight for survival? Do you shake yourself up and urge the delusions of a grand journey to vanish? Do you apply all your might and push out this thing that is choking you from the point at which lies the source of your existence? Or do you give in, and flow and hope that perhaps in time you'll reach an island all yours. Not pretty, but yours. After drowning that deep, coming alive to humanly necessities would irritate, at least for sometime.

It was not easy to grasp him, literally and figuratively. However, that the difficulty would begin manifesting as a corrosive, intense force within me so soon was something I was not prepared for. I cried, but even worse, I did not stop enjoying. It was like the romance which fatalities inherently comprise of. The ride with the jerk was getting jerkier - but would I like it as much if it were any different? He was not as indecipherable now as he seemed dubious. He was unwritten still, and gloriously so, but I rewrote him in the moment I saw him allow me to walk away. Our acquaintance was a few days old, but we had begun expecting some ridiculous, scarred part of ours to be tended to by the other. Weighed down, and weighing down.

He smelled of smoke. Not just that, I reckon he was a creature of smoke. If you could hallucinate molten smoke, that's how his eyes would look at their worst, and their best.

My memories of him are of the moments I spent with him inside my head, no necessarily in his arms. And this should change before smoke rises to narrate its own tale.

By Leonid Afremov