IceAndBlood

 One day, I caught her off-guard. “What the heck do you think you’re doing? Plunging the nib of your pen into your wrists like that!” I cried. She looked at me as if I had popped out of the earth just yesterday, and continued to scratch her almond skin with the pen till blood spouted. I looked on with horror, too stupefied to do anything. For a long time, I waited. I waited for her to open to me. I waited to win her trust. Then she told me the story behind her scars. A story of a dark childhood, a reign of terror and neglect, abusive love affairs and chronic depression. “Sometimes, you know, my eyes itch for blood.” She said, “Rich red of blood. I feel as if the incandescent beauty of this warm liquid flowing out of myself outshines my drab life. It renews my hope to live. The pain, the pangs of the cuts,” she panted as adrenaline rushed all through her, “they revive in me the will to live, when I don’t wish to live anymore.” That was my first encounter with them. The Shado

“Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow Bloom and grow forever…”                                   Every day I walk out of my complex, I see a man with dishevelled hair and ragged clothes, scribbling on the path desperately, with a tiny piece of chalk. Faded pink. In big, bold letters. Letters I can make no sense of. I see his clouded eyes, blank and lost, as if nothing in the world matters to him, except perhaps those letters. I look at him with horror, pity or maybe, disdain, and keep a safe distance. Recently, something has changed in me. I look at him with empathy. I stare and I wonder. I wonder and I stare. What if I too end up like that – deranged, deluded, lost in an alternate universe? What if there is no question of ‘ending up’? What if I too am one like him? Lost in a blank space with nothing left to bank on? Strands of disobedient dirty hair fall over his eyes. He picks his pace. With frantic moves he scribbles. At times, he pauses, licks his lips for a moment