She sat on her bed looking out of the window at the setting sun. Was what she had held so dear not hers any more? Were things really changing? Why couldn’t her story be a little different? These questions were a constant companion of her solitude.

She remembered his having asked her once whether she had entered his story or if it was the other way round. She wondered whose story was playing out on the stage of their partially shared lives. Who was the central character of their story? Did THEY have a story at all? Or was it that they were two characters of two different stories that had bumped into each other by a sudden twist of fate?

He always told her that she asked too many questions. Far too many questions for him to answer. Questions to which there were No answers.

There were not so many questions to begin with. Earlier there were more shared silences, sidelong glances, a sudden and ‘accidental’ touch or a few words not really meaning anything but conveying so much. She was not sure when the questions had crept in.

Somebody knocked on the door bringing her out of her reverie. She went to the door. It was the girl living in the room across from her’s. She had come to borrow a nail paint. She pointed to the shelf where she put all her toiletries. The girl chose a nail paint to go with her dress. Her blue eye pencil was lying close by; the girl picked it up and smiled at her. ‘Do you think blue eye liner would suit me?’ She nodded her head. It would look very pretty in her dark big eyes.

She remembered how amazed he had been when he had noticed the blue eyeliner in her eyes. ‘You put blue kaajal in your eyes? What else? Green, Red and Brown too?’
She loved it when he noticed those things. What she loved further was that he was as clueless about the latest fashion fads for girls’ as a guy should be. He had quite the old world charm about him. She could not stand the newfangled metrosexual males who knew more about facial and waxing than she did.

She closed the door after the girl had left and came back to the bed with a magazine. She flitted through the pages, not really reading, her mind in some faraway place. She reminisced their first walk together, the first time he had told her that she looked beautiful when she left her hair open, the first time they had shared an ice-cream, their first fight and all of their firsts together. She looked up into the mirror on the adjacent wall and found herself smiling at all the memories. She had been told that she looked pretty when she smiled. She picked up her phone and dialed his number, suddenly wanting nothing more than to talk to him.

Ring. Ring. Ring. ‘Hello, Listen I am really busy. I will call you later. Ok? Bye’
‘Later? Ofcourse. Bye’
She looked out of the window again. The night had arrived. It was a moonless night.