Evening

The eyes have it all. His incessant flow of curiosity during my French lessons, the distinctive early teenage tenderness of face muscles hiding the cheekbones and the penetrating unsteady enthusiasm in his gaze - the eyes capture everything. But it has been six years. The face develops a tad slower than the intellect during the salad days; still, he was the first to recognise me despite the facemask.

While we chatted wholeheartedly about our present professional and academic endeavours, our goals and vision of life, how the pandemic alienated us and our social network(not the virtual one) shrunk drastically, my gaze was fixated on the softness and its obliterative trace which still remains in his recently deserted teenage face.

I noticed his radiating smile, his jawlines, the uneven skin of his lower lips, his neatly brushed teeth and the mild pink hues in his tongue when he licked the upper lip while speaking. From a distance I felt I could smell, touch, fondle and caress the nape of his neck, the dense and unadulterated dark hair around the occiput, drag him swiftly towards me and hug him tight.

“Why don’t we take a photo together after six years? We are friends now.”, I wish I could say.

It was needed. It is an actual need of the time when every relationship is fleeting, when “most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.”

I am still waiting for a second chance.