Headspace (Book 1) ✓

11. waves

Because she was my love and I was soon becoming hers.

Just like that, everything was perfect until one day, she decided to confront me and talk about things that she didn't know I had read in the notebook. As much as I appreciated her sharing her deepest, darkest secrets with me, it was something I didn't want to hear since it hit a delicate nerve.

It reminded me of my own darkness, my own blindfold and I didn't know how to react to her confessions when I knew them already. Because no matter how hard I tried to forget, her words would randomly show up again in my mind whenever I had a moment to myself.

How desperately she was trying to run away, how badly she was trying to hold on and how peaceful she thought it was to put an end to all of this. So, when she turned the words on the crumpled page into spoken sentences, I didn't know how to hold myself together anymore and reacted a bit too harshly, picturing her dead all over again. As if she was going to leave me crying near her grave this time too. The mere thought made me lose all my patience and calm.

So we fought and ended up sitting on the beach in anger, hesitantly, with our egos letting the sound of our breaths be the only source of our auditory communication. All we could hear were the waves at a certain distance. Crashing against each other yet always returning to the shore in the end. I couldn't help but wonder if our relationship was somewhat like the waves.

Because no matter where we would go, no matter how stubborn we would be; we knew that someday or the other, we'd choose to return to the shore that eagerly awaited our arrival. Someday, we all have to come together, whether or not willingly. As if we were bound by the laws of space and time. As if we were destined to come together no matter how apart death had pulled us.

In that moment, sitting next to her and glaring at the waves when a fire burnt through my veins, Lyra angrily shoved her elbow into my stomach, jerked my hand in her direction and rested her head on my shoulder. That's when I realised no one is self reliant. We all need someone to lean on. And choosing to let my own fears and inhibitions flow with the wind, I rested my head on hers; our arms locked together as if none of us wanted to ever let go.

But that's the thing about fate. Just like the lines on a graph paper, either our lives are meant to coincide till infinity or intersect at a particular point of time, and then, come the bittersweet goodbyes when we part ways again. I'm not so sure if the rules of algebra apply to our alternate version of events anymore but come to think of it, what are the chances Lyra and I would have ever crossed paths in the first place?

With so many inhaling living beings in the world, it is next to impossible to count the permutations of us having an effect on someone's life and someone affecting ours in return. But like the blue moon, some lines are never meant to intersect. No matter how hard those lines try to come close, they might even succeed in leaving a negligible distance between them, but if they're not meant to be, they won't coincide despite all the efforts they make.

Like the stubborn parallel lines that never meet in spite of being so similar, we can never come close to some people no matter how hard we try. Well, this is how you could sum up Lyra's relationship with her adoptive parents. Close yet far. Complete yet incomplete. Family yet strangers. In spite of all the years they had shared together.

"Okay, so, will you tell me now?" I raised a brow at her and she scooted away from me, remembering she was supposed to be angry, still. Knitting her eyebrows together, she clearly expected an apology from me. I knew she wanted one but she wouldn't ask for it, being the hotheaded prick she was. "No?" I asked, impatiently.

I half-expected that she was going to let her anger blast out at me anytime now. She would yell at me, curse me and hit me till I apologised. But what she did was nothing like I imagined. As we were sitting apart after she remembered our fight again, she hadn't spoken a single word since I brought up the topic she was denying to admit and I could feel a storm brew in the silence.