He saw something in her eyes which was alien. It was like a faint grey that had showed up in those beautiful eyes. She wasn’t quite herself – uneasy and lost.He took her hand and waited for her to look up at him with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I am sorry” were all the words she spared.
She saw reflection of her own eyes in his' and recalled how she had fallen for his ‘talkative eyes’. Over the past season of troubled waters he had subtly and sensitively done his best to bridge the gulf but she had never let the water calm. Now submerged in the same flood she groped for the bridge, for the hand in help she had persistently refused. He would understand - was all she knew and could think of at the moment.
"In spite of all differences I have never, never wanted to be... I am sorry, I am really sorry."
All these months he had patiently cared for her silence and had never forced her into words. He had faith in his love and waited for the wall to crumble but now the wall had come crashing on him. Shrinking back to his own self, he looked at the truth of not being able to revert what has happened.She had been unfaithful but not willingly perhaps, it could have been her weakness but not her deliberate will. And that was the worst of it all, he had always made such earnest efforts to understand her that it came naturally to him. He could not bear to be sympathetic to her weaknesses at a time he least wanted to be reasonable. How could he be mad at her even after knowing the loneliness that gripped her over the years , the void that neither of the two could fill, the void that had almost become a part of them and had now taken a different meaning and echoed various sounds.
Though throughout the period of differences she had blamed him for causing her pain ,it was he who suffered the agony of being in love of her,of being blamed by her and of believing in the better and happier morrow. Pain for him was locked up within and cloaked with hope but not liberated by it.
The sudden downpour on the agony he had nurtured with such care, dissipated it in a cruel coldness that almost burned the inner walls of his self. He saw the tears ceaselessly and pleadingly trickling down her cheeks and it irritated his bruises further. The ire cooled and in no time left him with bruises and blisters all over.It could not cool and push him to suffocation. It could not…
He pressed her hand ,tears stopped and in her eyes he saw the grey die for the blue.He saw pain metamorphose into hope in her eyes and he felt himself disintegrating into meaningless nothings.
He slighted her head that rested on his shoulder and left her hand, took his eyes away from her and walked towards the door. The sudden coldness was unfamiliar and knocked at her walls within. She knew what to make out of it but shrunk from facing it.
He opened the door and walked out, leaving her with a parting glance and in that glance was captured the colour of dusk in her eyes and a profound sense of equality.
