Reflection

He did only what made him happy and nothing else mattered to him. It didn’t matter if his actions were  considred rational or irrational, right or wrong, good or bad in the eyes of the society. He didn’t want anybody to judge him, not even god. He wanted to be the judge of his own actions.To face the world  by himself, all alone like a boat standing up to a  storm in the middle of an ocean. He knew that if he was wrong in his own eyes he could never be happy and if he was happy then he couldn’t be wrong. That was all there was to life;simple and so uncomplicated. When he laughed everybody looked at him. He laughed uproariously at every silly joke. The carelessness of his laugh scared the world, shook them all out of their slumber. The world secretly despised him as he had no ambition and  no plans to do anything with his life. He wanted to float like a boat in an ocean without a rudder to steer it. Even in times of sadness he found a strange kind of pleasure. He would shut himself in a room or go all alone on an unplanned vacation,wander in places unheard and unseen. Sadness was verisimilar to a dive in a pool ;you feel water all around you, displacing you slowly and slowly, and then you are weightless, but you still have to make an effort and splash around to  fight the water or else you will drown.

She wanted to look for happiness in every action. It eluded her. Sometimes she thought she had found bliss ,  the secret elixer of happiness, but the feeling lasted only for a while and then again it was an eternal search, an eternal search for happiness. She never found joy in the ‘simple pleasures of life’. She found nothing beautiful. She was indifferent to it all. Indifferent to beauty, indifferent to her surroundings, indifferent to emotion, indifferent to life. She never laughed. No joke, no human being, nothing had ever made her laugh.
She knew that she looked beautiful, and that every guy she knew secretly dreamt of her. She didn’t care. One day she concluded that happiness was just an illusion.People kept repeating the same things over and over again in a vain hope; in search of something that didn’t seem to  exist.

That day she saw him for the first time, standing under his apartment. He was laughing at her?. No he wasn’t. He wasn’t even looking at her, he didn’t even know her. What was he laughing at so uproariously? She had this mad rush in her head; she had to talk to him. She saw him getting into the elevator and  ran after him. They both entered the elevator together. She had to talk to him because she knew something which he didn’t and she had to tell him. She had to tell him as soon as possible. He smiled at her, she smiled back.
That day he saw her for the first time. It was a hot summer day and he was standing in the shade, under his apartments. She looked so restless standing in the sun. He laughed at her, hoped that she would come and talk to her because he had to tell her something. Something which he knew but she didn’t. She entered the elevator just in time. He smiled at her, she smiled back.

In the elevator there was a large mirror hanging right behind them. They turned around to look into the mirror. In the mirror she saw him and he saw her. It seemed  as if they were the reflection of each other, that all differences were hidden in the mirror, that their reflections were the same.

And then they told each other ..................

-Anirudh Gupta