I Dreamed of Love

Copyright © [2021] [MAYASAM]   All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. This book is a piece of imagination and all characters in it have no link to any person dead or alive. avoid plagiarising and quoting snippets from the book to avoid any serious consequences. Hope you enjoy another journey with me. Love is what I hated. Love is what hurts the most and that I have seen. So I vowed to never love. I vowed to never let anyone in and I vowed to hide it behind the mask of happiness to not break me this time. But I remember the day it vanished into thin air. The day was when someone said. “I need this because I am alone,” That stroke me hard. The five-letter word snatched my better judgment. Aloof was I as I looked into her eyes. A truth so subtle is hard to digest. A truth that lived in my being for years was in front. Someone like me. Someone who wanted to raise the curtains of loneliness and seclusion. So I had to ask her a question but more restlessness was inside me. “Is loneliness justified as a reason to get this?” She looked up to me and for the first time or maybe the third time in my life, I felt something weird happening inside. Those transparent eyes. They were not blue, not grey but in the middle somewhere. Where I couldn’t decipher the change. There were numbness and a stroke of sadness in them. She stammered and then fidgeted her finger, as her lips tried to state something I already knew. Just a pinch in me to let her speak. So she did at last. “It haunts me at nights and I want to get rid of that. I am afraid,” with that a tear slipped through her eyes and I rested myself with the back of my chair. “You got the job,”   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- They say the house across the sea is haunted. Nobody knew who lived there years back and nobody knows who lives there now. They say that the woman loved a man and when she bore her child, he left her alone in the house, the size of the entire town. He left her alone across the sea, alone and desperate. There are myths about whether she lived or died. But they say that she committed suicide with the child she bore. They could only say as nobody had a witness to what they say. They say that a woman could be seen walking to the sea at night when the tidal waves are at their highest peaks. As the wild waves rush out to the sand taking everything with them to the bottom of the never-ending sea, her steps fasten towards them. Sometimes she carries a child with her when she walks past the wet sand into the roaring waves as it washes her with them.  Every night her child cries at night when the sea is at rest, pious and subtle. The town echoes with the cries of that poor child as mothers tuck their children inside shushing them that if they don’t sleep the woman in the mansion would take them and their pleas will echo as this child forever. But what if the child cried because he was alone. But to hear and to bear are two different things and nobody in that town understood that. What if there is a story attached to the house across the sea? Should anybody look into it or the myth should continue ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The first time he saw her he was bewildered by her beauty. He understood the meaning of femme fatale when he first saw her as the deep candlelight and marigold shades of dying sun crosses the horizon of the river with a Nymph residing beside its reef. The beauty was unique and exceptionally rare, like a diamond hidden deep in the depths of a coal mine, raw and unpolished. Like a mud-stained face of a playful kid, with beauty hidden beneath the grains of clay on their face. He knew he found the one for his lifetime. As long as it was. From a distance, behind the cover of lush green trees, he could see the brunette with elongated strands of brown hair with flakes of gold flaunting with the chilly west winds, seated across the shore of River Bystraya. He could only see her back but the voice of the giggles as the salty water touched her feat was echoing in the vacant riverbed, like a melody of a beautiful song, It made it sure she was as beautiful as the voice. This was where they met for the first time. The first time his feet got hitched between the beds of Amanita Muscaria and despite the fresh cool breeze he inhaled he still felt like he couldn’t take the next breath before her face was visible to her. He slowly stepped towards her like a hunter towards a beautiful Red-tailed deer, the most beautiful of the one, the one you don’t startle, the one you wait until you are an inch away and then with a swift motion you pounce on it. In the same way, he was a hunter and she was like a little deer, ignorant of the surrounding, fulfilling the life to the brim of her capacity. As he stepped closer to her, his fingers trembled as they moved towards the hollow surface between her shoulder and neck, hidden beneath the cover of a flimsy cover of a brown colored local maxi. Wasn’t she cold? Maybe his warmness could absorb her coldness. As his cold fingers placed on her shoulder, the giggle echoing in the winds of the west got startled and they halted. She turned around and the winds stopped bothering him, everything just halted.  The color of those eyes had the color one of the most beautiful of edged glass and crushed ice. It was the color of water droplets being melted of an iceberg, opaque and transparent. The skin was a shade of white smoke and floral white with the crease of the heart-shaped curved pink full lips adding a heavenly addition to her perfection. Her skin was rough with the wild slaps of hurling winds, pink and rosy, and the nose dainty also a shade of red on its tip. Those little freckles spread across her cheeks like little droplets of dust made him smile. He knew for once in his life he got happiness in those hollows of innocence. The expressions of those eyes changed and the giggle in the eyes was transformed to fear and confusion, making me a little guilty of bursting her little bubble. “Who are you?” I asked as I crouched down to her level. “Ashk,” Just a little gesture from her side as she picked the pitcher and was about to cross me over when I grabbed her hand from behind as I asked, “What does that mean?” “Love,” An answer in a foreign accent but I didn’t mind as I let her go for the time being. But not for too long I promise. “I promise to love you as your name. I promise as long as we both live we will cherish the mean of your name,” I murmured to myself as I saw her vanish in the tall green trees like a little dear.  A predator let his prey go just because it melted his heart.