It’s somewhere between eleven, eleven thirty in the night. I don’t remember the exact time when we pulled in but I remember being glad about not being caught in traffic. I had promised mother that we’d be back home in time and figured that midnight would be a decent curfew to bargain for. She had agreed, after little discussion and some persuasion, and we had set off for our night out in the city. You and I both were exhausted; it had been a long night already. We had eaten and drank to our heart’s content and I had also danced to my heart’s content. You had never been much for dancing anyway and I didn’t mind. Somewhere in my mind I was often happy about the few things where we stood differentiated, not in opinion so much but in choice. I wasn’t someone who you’d ever find sipping a hot cup of tea on a bright Sunday morning and no one would ever find you not wanting to eat potatoes. On areas of concern more grave and important to a relationship, we almost always saw eye to eye and for that I knew we both were grateful. Mother came to receive us at the door, I gave her a good night hug and assured her that she could now to go sleep- we had made it back home all safe and sound. I didn’t ever really fully understand what she’d always be so anxious about. You wished mother and father a pleasant night, thanked them again for having you over and excused yourself. I saw you walk into my room and crumble to the floor. I finalised plans for breakfast for the next day with Kim and proceeded to join you for the night. Like me, Kim was also an insomniac. I had concluded that after all those years of always finding him on his feet whenever I’d make my way to the kitchen.
You were still sitting on the floor, cross-legged and resting your back against the bed when I walked in some fifteen minutes later. I shut the door behind me and realised that you hadn’t even bothered to switch on the fan in the room. The weather had been pleasant for the past week or so but it wasn’t good enough either that you could do with no air circulation in a room. You had your knees pulled up under your chin, your hair hiding half your face and the light from the phone in your hand reflecting sparsely off your glasses. You looked tired but comfortable, where you were and I said nothing. I walked over to the other side of the room to draw the curtains and shut the windows. I moved around you to get to the side table and found the remote to the air conditioner. I set the temperature at 18 degrees first but changed it to a 22 within a minute because I didn’t want you getting too cold. You were glued to your spot, idly browsing through the internet on your phone. I asked if you were feeling okay and if the cold in the room was alright and you replied with a slight nod and a thumbs-up. I made my way to the cupboard to pull out a change of clothes for the night and counted the steps I took in between for no particular reason at all. I glanced at my phone for a second but there were no new notifications and I put it right away, there and then. I was still holding out the doors to the cupboard I had opened when I paused for a second, took a short deep breath and turned around.
There you were, in my room, not more than five steps away from me. You looked so beautiful, like you always did but in that moment, you were iridescent. I still could not believe that you had actually found some time off from work and family commitments to have made this trip to come visit me and spend some time with me. You had no idea how much it meant to me and always would, for the rest of my life. I remember the day, about a month and a half ago when I received an email from you at one in the morning with no subject, no mail body but simply an attachment. It was flight tickets. I had been confused and felt completely lost at first when I saw it. I figured you were probably still at work, one of your many late nights, booking flight tickets for another family member for a work tour they had to take. Maybe you had mistakenly emailed me the tickets instead of your cousin. I pulled myself together and wrote back to you immediately asking you to share the details with the right person straight away so that no confusion would arise at work because of it. But, to my surprise, I was the one who was mistaken. You had made no error. The flight had been booked by you, in your name, because it was meant for you and the destination marked on that air ticket was no co-incidence either. You called me the second you saw my reply to your email and asked me how I had liked your present. I was confounded for a moment then and I was confounded right now too. Here you were, after all those days, finally having made your way to my city and to me. Oh gosh, I could keep looking at you, from so close and yet so far away, for an innumerable number of hours. I don’t know why it was so difficult to wrap my head around the fact that we were holidaying together, in the summers, at my house. You looked up at me with a question mark etched on your face and asked if something was wrong. I rushed to the door, locked it and rushed back to you. You obviously didn’t know what I had been thinking about and how would you have known anyway. Believe me, if you did, it would be mostly always embarrassing for me to be around you for more than a minute. I held no restrain over my over imaginative, brave and wandering mind. I smiled, said I was okay, and shut the cupboard. I was about to offer you the bathroom to use first in case you had wanted to freshen up before me but I said nothing. Though there were a million feelings I was feeling in that moment all at once and there were more than a million words jumbled in my head wanting me to make sane sentences of them so that I could tell you how much you meant to me and how much I loved you, not a syllable escaped my mouth. Lest I say something wrong or stupid and ruin this moment forever, I stayed shut.
I had assumed it was all under control but I think up until that second my hands had had enough of it. My skin craved for your touch, my body was hungry for your warmth, my fingers desperately and eagerly wanting to be reunited with yours to lay intertwined with them all night and my lips, they did not want a second’s worth more of waiting. I called your name out, your eyes made their way to mine and I froze. The next instant I was on the floor, on my knees, sitting right opposite you. I think it took you a brief moment but you read it in my eyes right away. You said nothing and for the longest time I thought I had stopped breathing. I couldn’t hold your gaze for long; it was like looking at the sun. In the words of Beau Taplin, it felt as if I was falling for you like gravity had let go of the earth. The windows to the rooms in my heart had opened up all at once. There was pin drop silence in the room, in the house, but I could hear your heart pounding against your chest, surprisingly more wildly than mine. I was glad I had picked the room furthest away from all the other rooms in the house. The curtains were drawn and the lights had never been switched on but there was soft white and yellow light streaming into the room from the street below. I believe we were both the most comfortable in that setting. The dark always made us feel welcomed; in its individual, distinct capacity it was home to the both of us.
“Hey there, love”, you said, and brought an end to the silence. The violent waves inside of me had finally found a shore to crash on. There could have been no dam strong enough and no current fierce enough that could have held us back or drifted us apart in different directions in that time. It had all happened very quickly and very slowly. I cupped your face in my hands and pulled you closer into me. That kiss would be one of the most magnificent kisses of my life. My right hand moved into your hair and our bodies soon found rhythm. You smelled so good, like the beach, and I took it all in, as much of it as I could. The other hand moved down along the side of your body, tracing your curves and relishing every bit of it. It finally rested on your waist, my fingers curled around the shape of your body and if I could, I said out loud, I would wish to hold on to that moment forever. Love had never flown through me in such ways, untethered and shameless.
Kaiyo, that was a night to remember. It always will be.