Liana

Breakups are difficult, you know. You suddenly feel like you have entered into a void. An endless dark pit where emotions are non-existent and you have all the space in the world for an eternal rendezvous with your desolation. Of course, there is this pseudo sense of freedom but sooner or later we realize that singularities have no meaning in our social dimension. We are incomplete without others and so are they.

Her name was Liana. And she was as wonderful as her name is. When the wind embraced her hair, I felt she was a meadow. When she smiled, I wanted to calibrate the word “beauty” from it. When she looked at me, everything else disappeared, or so I felt. She cared for me as if I was her child. And she weaved her world, her ambitions and her aspirations around mine. For the beauty she was, I was the beast. The worst part being, I didn’t even realize until it was too late. But the questions still haunt me, every single day, every single moment.

Since then, years have gone by and I have become a zombie of sorts. I move around places without knowing where am I heading. I have lost track of time, friends and kin. Sometimes I feel like those toy-figures whom we used to key and put on the floor and they moved around aimlessly clapping with a pretentious smile to cover up the blues. And today I seem to have reached an Art Gallery showcasing the works of this new young sensation.

Lately, I had started liking such art exhibitions. Not that I have the ability to interpret the work more than others do but I really like the quietness inside. We hardly see people absorbed into something like that. People keep staring at these paintings for hours looking to create some causal analysis. These art works are like puzzles and artist, the riddler.

This one painting, at the farthest corner, was unusually dreary. And perhaps that’s why there was no one in front of it. Just the way I like it. I sat on the bench for a date with this wonderfully weird painting. The first impression that I got from it was that it was extremely saddening and difficult to the eye. It had the power of ripping a happy-go-lucky person apart into pieces so much so that he would happily drown in the seas of melancholy.

Apparently the only thing that gets a sad person to think is something which he perceives as even more sad than his own state of mind. And that is what got me going. It started bothering me that I could not understand the dilemmas of this girl in the painting. She was crying her heart out but was hiding her face from these shadows. Perhaps she was keeping all the pain with her. May be she opened up and no one understood her pain. But these shadows were certainly bothering her. These shadows were surrounding her from everywhere as if she was held hostage in that corner. The shadows snatched her away from brightness and pushed her into that dark oblivion.

The bench was not comfortable anymore. I had to go closer to the painting.  The closer I went, the more connection I felt. Her eyes drew me even close, so much so that the only thing I could see now was her eyes. And then suddenly, I felt, as if the painting had pulled me in. And then I was playing the game of shadows. I saw myself doing what the shadows were doing to the girl. It did not feel unreal. It felt like a déjà-vu.

After few minutes, when I resumed my senses, I was still sitting on the bench. But now I knew what I had seen. There was this sudden rush of current in my body. I ran to the other paintings. I had seen that smile somewhere. I had seen that meadow somewhere. I had seen those tears somewhere. Suddenly there was some commotion at the gates. The artist is here, said the voices.

I don’t know what made me go back to that farthest painting. And when I looked at it, there were no shadows this time. It was me torturing that girl to stay back in those shackles. It was me butchering her wings and killing her flight. It was me who made her a slave, an entertainment and a toy. I leaned further towards the painting where lay the initials of the artist still pretending ignorance on my part. And there was it, scribbled in italics, “Liana”.

The exhibition now felt like a time machine taking me through the horrors of my own past. How foolish was I to not see it then. If only had I cared a bit more for her words. Tears came out of me like a fountain. The heart was pumping like never before. I ran towards the gates. She was surrounded by people. I looked at her one last time. She turned towards me, her hair moving away, like a meadow. For the beauty she was, I was that beast. Oh, did I tell you before, she liked to paint.