OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS...

I’m not standing in a pew in an altar. This isn’t a Sunday confessional. This is a confession, nonetheless. Sunday, too.

I guess when you are terribly smitten by a girl almost half your age, you feel like an adolescent kid just experiencing his first boyhood crush. I feel elated, stand rejuvenated. Is it love then? I don’t know… don’t know if anybody does…

But I don’t do anything. Torn between a perverse desire to let my wishes known to her and to keep mum, I rather sit idle. The Berlin Wall springs out of nowhere and stands between us— dark, foreboding, insurmountable. The pain is excruciating. It’s like taking a step towards the inexorable leap, the final nothingness. The angst eats me from within.

Yet she comes back in my sleepless dreams every night— smiling, invigorating and exuberant. That is all. That is enough for me, for the time being. That smile is an elixir.

Skeletons that I have preserved in my closet for what it seems an eternity now, perform a dance macabre, like gnomes from a cave. Of love and other demons, none can be exorcised. Asking for forgiveness is a cheap theory, for nothing can be undone.

She is somebody else’s. Or, was. She’ll be with somebody. Not me. But she’s there, out in the ethereal cyberspace.

Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun had ‘letters of gold’, they say. If she touches my blemishes once, my life will be golden. Scars healed, I will be whole…