Droplets

Sometimes, in my flashes of forgetting, I couldn't remember the first time I had slit her skin.

She told me there was no first time. No first of its kind. No beginnings. She introduced me to her realm of deja vu -- where all beginnings kept repeating from time immemorial.

Blood was her expression of deja vu. Recurrence.

Her blood was strangely cohesive. They sprang from the association of her being, defied the gravity and froze somewhere in the air. They captured a block of air in my room and made a home. When the sunrays touched them the red droplets kept glowing for a few hours until they turned brown. Drying. The patches kept lingering in intangible spaces of my room. They smelled of the sea.

Her blood was also volatile. I could remove the strains of the brown blood from my undiluted air by simply holding the burning end of my cigarette beneath it. And see them fade like my memories. But I'd never be able to take a puff of those used cigarettes, ever again. Their taste would change. And they smelled of the sea.

She had come out of the sea one moonlit night. Naked and bleeding.

She had slit herself beneath her neck and above her breasts. Droplets of the sea played all over her body. Running down. Crashing. Jostling. Mingling. Magnifying. Making its way through them was a stream of blood.

"Taste it", she said.

Unable to understand what I should taste, I tasted the seawater and her blood. They tasted the same. The same that it had everytime. Deja vu.

I knew people would call this a game of sadism. Still I would slit different parts of her body many times on her request -

"Clown, you know I can't cry. Can never let you taste my tears, but I desire tears like any girl does. Help me. Please, let my body weep the blues."