Dear readers,
I’ve gone back to the name of my original and first blog. Because tennis always runs through my veins and believe it or not, if it wasn’t for tennis, I wouldn’t be who I am. Besides the name is so much more unique.
Not much tennis content though so don’t delete right away. I’ve always wanted to write a short story around tennis, but somehow it just never happens. My favorite worlds just never come together.
Photography and tennis and writing. I have all these little compartments in my life and as always in my life, these compartments have remained separate. I hope I can do something on these newsletters to bring them all together in some form.
Anyhow, all I wanted to say was: Hello! Words and Images has changed a little—different name; same content.
And to inaugurate, here is a short story that never went into the book and I’ve decided to keep outside the paywall.
In future, I will try to keep as much content as I can outside the pay wall. Unfortunately, due to the Sensitive nature of some of my images, my photography will from time to time be behind the pay wall for paid subscribers only.
Enchanted
Finally, after hours of pointless nagging, they left the bar for home. He’d invited Chris and Jammie along.
She wasn’t happy about it but for now, had to keep her discontent private. She didn't want to create a scene. Not in front of the others.
At least she’d gotten him to come home with her this time. An important step in the larger scheme of things.
Once home, he took out their special box and rolled a joint. They opened beers. She was tired and would have loved to sleep, lay to rest her drunkenness, but for the mosaic of voices and music that kept yesterday pried open. She did a line from the back of a CD being passed around.
She tried to catch his eye.
She remembered a time when this was all he did—look into her eyes; the way water sees the sky. How resilient she had felt, then.
She wondered how could he do this so easily now—stay liberated from her thoughts and feelings—and how she couldn’t do it at all. That is, to stop thinking about him.
If he’d gone to Brownies they’d have to play the phone game again. She’d call and he wouldn’t answer. And then she’d keep calling till she wore his battery down.
After waiting a respectable amount of time, she would call Chris’ phone. Then Michael’s. And then, after the second day, when his friends couldn’t help any longer, she’d try anyone else’s number she might have had stored.
Once, when she was very angry, she’d thrown the remainder of her guacamole into the top drawer of his nightstand where he kept all the empty baggies and weighing scales and the Vitamin B he used to cut his stuff with.
Another time, she’d taken a pair of scissors and shredded his shirts. The first one she’d gone for was the blue button-down with ruffles. She’d wanted to hurt him. To take away what mattered to him the most.
Leaving wouldn’t be punishment enough.
It was an exhausting game. She was exhausted.
She didn’t ask much from him. All she wanted was that he come home like a normal person at a normal hour and they turn the lights off together like everyone else.
Those nights she stayed up waiting for him—she could hear whispers through the fine silence inside and count footsteps scatter on the streets below as she stared absently at the edge of a paper writhe beneath the fan. But she could tell no one. Her insides had been set on fire and she had to endure it with all the dignity she could scrape together.
She needed him home, desperately, if only to stop herself from going mad. He had to be there to help her cope with his own absence. Ironic, isn’t it?
Some time or the other, Chris and Jammie would inevitably have to leave. The beer would run out, even if the uncut stuff going around on the CD case didn’t. And then the two of them could go to sleep.
Resume life.
Till evening rolled in, ever faithfully, like a bewitched lover.
She couldn’t make out what time it was—the curtain was drawn. But she could see white light strangled by the thick cotton, through gaps.
Brownie’s would be closed by now.
Eventually, Chris and Jammie got up.
She realized she’d been holding her breath this entire time.
“Oh, are you leaving already?” she said, with tactful surprise.
“Can I go with them?” he said. May be asked.
“Where?”
“To Lucky’s.”
She’d forgotten it was Saturday morning in a city full of disenchanted people. There were always bars open at any given hour.
She just gave him the look and he looked apologetically at his two friends.
All of this felt too routine, too obligatory.
Sometimes, she felt she was keeping him hostage from doing all the things he wanted to do. Although, what those things were, was a mystery. At other times, she couldn’t help think she had rescued him from something despicable.
She didn’t think of what she wanted. She thought that if she could only sort out his life, their life together— that is, to get him to come home in a timely manner, cook, watch television, go to sleep, wake up and eat breakfast together, maybe, just maybe get a real job— then her own life would automatically fall into place.
It had worked—on a good week— now and then.
He said he was going down to put them in a cab.
She thought it was quite unnecessary, considering it was already daylight but again, didn’t want to cause a scene.
She waited by the window, which looked out into the courtyard and the narrow little alley through which you could see a sliver of the street.
She watched them walk out as though she’d let him go for good—with that impending sense of inevitability that had calloused her insides over time.
But she kept looking, trying to find all the reasons, any reason, that she might be wrong after all.
At some point in their seven years together she’d grown tired of expecting the worst and had started praying for the best instead.
Seven years that had dissolved like ice in luke warm water.
She watched through the alley as a cab stopped in front. He opened the door and the two girls got in. She could see the back of Chris’ dress go up slightly as the girl climbed in.
He shut the door behind them.
She let her gaze fall. For one second. Just for one second and in that moment, that little opening in time, the cab was gone.
She expected to see him walking back through the alley and courtyard. But perhaps, perhaps he had walked faster than her eyes could follow and was already inside the building, climbing up the stairs.
After all this time, she had earned that right to hope.
—END—