Dream a little dream of me

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As she struggled with her heavy cabin luggage, a chirpy attendant came forward for her help and together they tried to push it into the drawer above their heads. Thanking the attendant for her assistance she sat down on her window seat with the phone in her hand, headphones dangling from it. As she pushed her handbag under her chair, she stuffed the earplugs which were already playing some song. Since she had already gotten comfortable, she unlocked her phone with a simple pattern and opened the gallery. Her screen filled up with photos; photos with happy faces of her friends, cousins and a person; her person. She zoomed to the last few photos, selfies to be precise, taken some twenty-twenty five minutes ago. Two faces, smiling at the camera but a peculiar sadness in their eyes. Her fingers swiped to a particular one, where she looked pretty surprised because the person in the photo seemed to have stolen a kiss in between the shot. A smile along with a tear escaped from her lips and eyes as the announcement from a rather cheerful air hostess about tying the seat belts could be heard from the speaker above her head. She changed her phone’s status to flight mode and continued looking at that picture without realizing that her co-passenger was also stealing glances at her screen trying to figure out a story out of it for his own entertainment.  With a mock excitement in her tone she looked at her fellow passenger and greeted him with a smile before she closed her eyes.
Airplane rides always made her sleepy as ironical to her sleep pattern otherwise. As she dozed off to a state where her eyes couldn’t be kept open anymore her mind wandered off to the days she had spent with her person in the land which was meters beneath her feet now, literally.

~~ They had been planning an escape since some time now. She, a raging but silent rebel against her family and he, a free spirit, together they spun a web of lies. However impossible it had seemed, they managed one weekend and disappeared into the green valleys of the neighbouring state. Her fears used to increase every passing hour of the day. But his calm touch used to cool her down. With her head on his shoulder they crossed the zig zags and ups and downs of those hills. The downpour had made the city livelier; and being in that place with that person seemed unreal to her. She had to look up to him and hold his firm hand to reaffirm and make herself believe that it indeed was true.
The evening was turning out to be colder than they had imagined. But they didn’t seem to complain. Wandering in this city with him besides her was an experience that she always wanted to come across. And the fact that it was happening felt no less than a dream. Maybe even he had been feeling the same way as he gazed deep into her eyes while they hogged that delicious macNcheese which made her so nervous for a moment that she tried cracking some real silly joke about the dessert topping that they had ordered. With a long sigh they both witnessed the rainy evening passing over into an even gorgeous night sitting in that alfresco cafe holding a hot cup of coffee after a merry round of food. How they both must have wished this night to never come to an end. But it did. That weekend did come to an end. But it sure was a beginning of a new experience in their lives. ~~

With a sudden jolt she came back to her senses. The plane was witnessing a minor weather turbulence. She didn’t care much about it. But she panicked more when she couldn’t find her phone in her hand. She was relieved only when the man sitting beside her pointed to the ground showing her the phone that had landed at a corner due to that jerk because of her loosened grip from her dreamy sleep. She was irritated with his grin and thought of closing her eyes back to avoid this man’s unwanted stares. She felt an immediate calm when he floated back to her mind. She enjoyed the flashbacks like a film reel. He was her fire, he was her wind. He was her purity, he was her sin.

She knew that now that she had come away from him, things would be rather hard for them, again. But one thing assured her. When was their life uncomplicated, ever? That didn’t stop them from being in love any less any day. Even when life had created a mess out of their lives they kept playing with this joke very seriously. However fragile it was they kept saving it. And they didn’t care. They never would.

As her flight started its descent she prepared herself for a life without him until the time she saw him again. She opened her phone one more time and zoomed to the picture she had been looking at at the beginning of her travel and tried to remember the exact moment when he had planted a kiss on her cheek that had rendered her speechless for a few seconds. Blushing now, she locked her phone and untied her seat belt while the voice from the speaker above her head instructed the passengers to open the over head cabins carefully. Pulling out her heavy luggage from above, without any help this time, she left the aircraft, only to be dissolved among the crowd with just a ringtone to be heard amidst the swarm of passengers pulling away from the flight that had just landed.

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