A short fictional story
“The woods,” she said, looking at her crimson-enamelled fingernails after pretending for a second or two to have thought it through. The wind ruffled his cyan t-shirt as if it wanted to convey something. He looked at her, up and down, supposedly pointing out to her the earth tones she was wearing, against the façade she’d put up. “Yeah. It was always going to be the woods; the beach just doesn’t seem all that versatile to me,” she replied. He folded his arms to lean back, and she could tell he differed.
Having absorbed yet another disappointing answer, he asked the next question. “Flight or invisibility?”
“Neither,” she replied, biting her lower lip, “but if I must, then – invisibility.”
It seemed to be the last straw. “I can’t believe it. This has never happened before.” His shoulders slumped. “How can two people not agree on even 1 out of the 10 questions? I mean, talk about polar opposites.” He shook his head and with an unfocused gaze whispered, “But I’ve never seen anybody with the same bottle.” He wasn’t sure if he was telling it to himself or wanted her to hear it.
The bottle; the canary yellow one she had got customised for herself. It was at an extremely crucial juncture in her life. She had thought hard about the message to get inscribed on it, thoughtfully selecting Dzongkha as the language and endlessly scrolling through different style variations to match her state of mind. To him, it was gifted by his dearest friend who had extensively searched personalised gift shops to eventually pick something that was already made. He had received it while setting out on something new. To both, it was their ray of hope, an inanimate object more faithful than any human could be.
She tightened her fist. The piece of paper inside suffocated some more. It contained her number; the one she had written wearing a shy smile. After a thought, she spoke. “I’m happy to be going where I’m headed, but I am happy to be passing through these fields, sharing this journey aboard this train with you just as well, if not more.” After a pause, she spoke again to the confusion in the man that he just could not understand. “We didn’t lie, did we? We had different answers showing our different personalities and we stuck by them, refusing to compromise or let go of ourselves.” “Is that a difference or a similarity,” she uttered, pacing each word with just the right pauses. “Our differences are our similarities, ain’t it?”, he responded sounding dumb to himself. But he had muttered it out.
“We scored a 1,” she said in a teasing tone with a large grin. “And, of course, the yellow tumbler, that’s 200,” her grin grew wider.
A smirk replaced his frown. As he started to come around, she found just the thing to say. “I find it enough to be a stranger with the same bottle as someone else on a train that one time.”
They were at the same place now.
“Almost.” She put the piece of paper in her hand back in her bag and brought out her yellow bottle. Then, she asked for his bottle while handing him her own.
“I find it enough to go on about my life, knowing a stranger I met has my yellow bottle somewhere in the world, and that I have his.”
“To our lives beyond mere numbers”, she pronounced as she raised her yellow love to Cheers.
They were in the same place yet again.
