“50 bucks for your thoughts” I said.
“You should say ‘A penny for your thoughts’. You’ll end up paying me too much” was the reply.
“Since you have been telling the most entertaining stories throughout this evening I won’t mind even if I have to cough up a bit. 50 bucks is anyway much lesser than what your thoughts deserve.”
We were sitting in a restaurant – me and a person I had met for the first time that very same evening on my way home from office. I don’t remember exactly how we ended up in the restaurant together. I simply remember that I had invited him for dinner and so the bill was on me. It was as if he was a professional who specialized in getting very close to a person in their first meeting. In fact, at the time of the above conversation I knew nothing about him except his name. He had been telling jokes and stories all the time. Somehow, he managed to weave all of his stories placing him as the central character. Now he had relapsed into a silence, prompting me to make the query.
His reply was, “I was thinking of another story. Let me tell you this one now.”
It wasn’t a very good story. It wasn’t even funny like his previous stories. The only way in which it was similar to the previous ones was that the protagonist was himself. It was the story of a guy (himself) and a girl who fell passionately in love with each-other. They were absolutely inseparable for a few years, the story went on to reveal, but slowly small misunderstandings started to creep into their relationship – too small to mention distinctly (He told me a few of them and they really were negligible.) and so these things were left unsaid, heaped at the bottom of their minds. However, this heap of unsaid things kept on growing until one day they realized that there was hardly anything left to say. Their parting was a mutual acceptance of the fact that they had let too much come in between them without realizing it or rather, realizing it too late to be able to do anything about it. They went their separate ways assuring themselves that they were still friends and that would be calling upon each-other in the future but, as usual, it didn’t turn out that way. However, somewhere at the bottom of their hearts they still loved each-other and would have liked to have a second shot at their relationship.
He took well over an hour in telling this story – describing all the events in vivid detail. So detailed were his accounts that he might even have told me the amount of traffic overlooking their window or the color of the curtains, for all I knew. He went through all the ups and downs of the relationship in the story as if he were living those events.
At the end of it my eyes were burning from staring at him continuously and I had forgotten all about the food, now getting cold. I asked him, “Where is she now?” and he told me. She was in the same city as we were.
The next day I took leave from my office and went looking for her. She was where he had told me she would be.
I tried a lot to meet him again but I couldn’t find him anywhere. To this day, neither I nor she knows who he was or how he knew our story better than either of us did at that time.
