Postcard

Hi everyone, I’m terribly sorry for not visiting in such a long time, sadly enough posting these days end up just being an afterthought. Today is Phagwah, the festival many of us Hindus celebrate to mark the beginning of spring. Today we throw coloured powder and water on friends, family and agreeable strangers (who can be of different religion and race) not only for the new season but also to commemorate Krishna’s fondness of pranks. This week’s Ermilia’s Picture It and Write! reminds me of the holiday, particularly the clouds. So here’s my bit. It’s been a while.

via Ermilia Blog, click the pic to see original prompt.

The pain at my temples throbbed like the beats in a Hall and Oats song. I stayed home today, and work was out of question with all of the indecision and confusion and plain all out frustration that had condensed into a dripping orb in my chest. I take a sip of the stuff of the bottom of my mug and nearly wretched. A day and a half old black coffee can do that to a body, served me right I supposed, I hadn’t gotten around to change the grounds. Nevertheless, picking it up made me feel a whole lot better for it revealed a recent postcard from some picturesque lake in Scotland from my best friend Riley.

It wasn’t very hard to believe such serene beauty was real, I grew up to long stretches of road with views of sun-lit cane fields on one side and rice on the other, took shade under coconut trees and shared that ever sentimental sky. Instead of feeling homesick, I wanted to pick up and drive off to where the sky met the ground in the far flung horizon.

The likes of lochs and miles of impossibly high mountains were utterly magnificent to my eyes that never beheld them. Riley kept convincing me to come, to meet the rest of his humongous family. I kept making excuses for some reason, I can’t fully understand why when all I want to do is roam and wander. Responsibility, that’s one I can speak for. But … it’s not like I’d be moving there, only just for a week or – dare I hope – two and that’s it. Simple. He knew, that goof, he just knew that that glossy rectangle of printed cardboard would lift me up and I didn’t even tell him what happened during the past week. We’re connected on a level we gave up trying to understand a long time ago.

Now, most people speculate (and I’ve heard with my own ears of some even betting) that we’ll end up tying the knot. We literally laugh off of our seats every time a stranger commented on what a lovely pair we make. Within our families we’re called ‘the twins’. Riley and I don’t exactly resemble, coming from two different continents. We pranked, read, sang and even speak together, at the same time in perfect synchronism and finishing each others sentences. Also, there’s that might fact we were born on the same day, two hours a part, our mothers refuse to tell us the older one to prevent further escalation in the occasional squabble. Quite plainly, we were like siblings.

So it hardly surprised me when I got a long distance call a few minutes ago. I was blissfully lost in a daydream, headache forgotten, of me flying though cotton candy clouds above mossy green stretches of flowing hydrogen and oxygen and then finally to turn down in a wickedly steep dive downwards into a watery oblivion. The phone call came from a most annoyed Scotsman in heavy brogue that demanded to know, “Wah the bleedin’ hell, Livy?”

Apparently Riley was adjusting the mast on his uncle’s fishing boat when he was abruptly hurled off and into the loch. There wasn’t the slightest wind. We’re weird that way.