…about what, she thinks.

Walking on cold asphalt under the warm neon lights? These lights stand guard here, she had thought. Tranquility, slowness, leisure, they guard against that. And sleep. She doesn’t visit often either.
There was an oil lantern on the coconut vendor’s cart, at the edge of the beach, where the waves stole up to lick her toes. She was watching the sea then, alone, both him and her, each reaching out to the other. There is a picture recording that moment. One can see her, black top, blue jeans, and a scarf around her shoulders; the light from the lantern casting shadows over one side of her face. The black of her hair merges with the night behind. She isn’t smiling. She remembers she hadn’t smiled much that evening.
There were also pigeons during the day, flocking in mad numbers to the fountain that she had seen in a gangster movie long back. The fountain was dry, but the pigeons still came, probably because they always had.
And of course, there was the film. About the beautiful artist who could paint everything into her life, everything other than love. There was insanity in those black eyes, she had noticed. Should she write about that?

Or about the other city, that came a little later? Where she stood in a balcony and watched the world: a basketball court full of uniformed young girls in crossed plaits; a man beating his wife on a neighbouring terrace; tall, brooding streetlights that never go on…
She has no pictures, but there was that one moment, when she sat in what they called the garden, toying with a cup of cold tea, thinking about someone on the other side of the wall. She often watched thunder, and the rain coming down on a waiting, wistful Earth.
Should she write about how it felt to be sleeping in the arms of this strange city? Must it be said? Can it be said?

A leaf carried in the air and placed on the surface of a placid stream.

One slow night with a dream that seemed like it would never cease. But that night has turned now; it won’t return. It has left spaces, though. Spaces where there is blackness and whiteness. Weight and lightness. Does she write about the unbearable lightness of being?

In time, however, other stories will fill those spaces. Other journeys and thoughts. Other people. Another imagination. Like a palimpsest, layer upon incomprehensible layer. What she wonders, though, is how much of it will she remember? Aloneness is certainly strange, but if it leaves her, she wonders if that won’t be aloneness of another kind…