The wind chimes tinkled and the soft acoustics of it reminded him of the warm summer breeze. He could close his eyes and be carried to the life it was. Romanticizing a little more always threatened to take him to what it could have been, but shutting it out had been his defense mechanism all along. He fidgeted with the idea of pulling out that box of smokes that was lying hidden for the past six months now, but he was stronger than this, wasn’t he?

The world has always been full of people who could take his breath away, and trying to forget the one who reminded him to breathe was never going to be so easy. She was the melody of his songs and the rightness of all his wrongs. It was her for whom his poems rhymed, and she was the muse who made his stories come to life. More than anything he couldn’t get her smile out of his head, the sound of her contagious laughter, the tiny dimple that etched itself on her pretty face every time she flashed it by. He had decided to never fall in love again, but she got it out of him without ever having to ask. And never could he say that even though it broke his heart, he hadn’t been, and still was, just glad that she happened.

Someone had told him when he was a boy to be the person he needed when he was younger. He had a tough childhood, a difficult adolescence and the person that evolved had a mask on at all times, had feelings locked at a safe heaven at all costs. Little did he know that the mask would someday become his face and the key to the locker would be a fantasy that he could amuse himself with on some lazy Sunday afternoons. You don’t need to be submerged under water to get the feel that you are drowning, and he had been for a long time till she came along. She reminded him of the beautiful oceans, calm and peaceful even with her million whirlpools, and she came on to him in the wildest of ways- and just as he was close enough to touch her, she would turn back again. And he saw in her a story waiting to be read, to be understood. To be embraced; and he knew that he loved her when she pointed to the sky and where all he could see were dense clouds,  with her at hand, he finally could look beyond at the Sun.

He should have told her how he actually felt. How he was different when he was with her. How the meaning of his life changed when she was around. How her child-like laughter meant the world to him and how she could glide though the clouds and the rains would shower upon him. How he could never give a label what his heart said because he thought that the most beautiful chapters in his life won’t have a title till much later. How he had been too afraid of love, too afraid that he would like it too much.

As he lay contemplating what could have been, he wondered if it were all worth it? To break into a thousand pieces and then picking them up together, knowing that you are bound to miss some and you could never be the same again.
For her? A thousand times over.