The Other World

Eons and eons of coastline lay before them and they just sat there without a care for anything. While they were here together, the world could move on without them, for all they cared! They would leave behind all their problems, all their frustrations. Just happy to be. After all, how many times did you get a chance to be away from everything and sit with a friend’s arm around you and a shoulder to rest your head on?

 Often the two of them just sat in silence and heard the waves go by or watch the stars hanging like chandeliers in the sky overhead, as if they were trying to tell us something. Something many people just didn’t bother about anymore.

The waves had another story to tell and they knew them to be eager listeners. The soft sound of the waves had something hauntingly nice about them. You felt like you were alone and yet as if there was someone around. 

It made you feel safely unsafe, if there was anything like that.

But it didn’t worry them too much, all they thought of was the unending horizon and the shade of stars overhead. This was their escape.

They sat there for hours on end, somehow unable to get over the fact that the sea shone like a fragmented mirror- dazzling and shining under the cover of the stars and the soft light of the moon. The world seemed so far away and strange from this piece of land- with all its hullabaloo and its troubles and problems.

Company mattered too and this was one place that neither brought anyone else to. It was meant for them, almost like a special song that a couple kept for themselves or a special seat in their favourite restaurant.

It was also the only place that they were their true selves, out in the open, in front of each other. Pulling back the layers of pretence and just being us- bare, vulnerable, happy, content. There was no fear of pain, of betrayal, of loss. Nothing. Just them. Being them.

That is when she began to talk of this as another world. A world where only the two of them existed, where they knew everything about the other and yet there was so much left to discover. He argued that they’d get bored pretty soon but she seemed adamant that it wouldn’t be so. And sometimes her conviction in the notion was so strong, it turned him into a believer too.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. In this other world.