Stars filled the sky like pale corn on freshly turned ground. It was the promise of life in the darkness, a sense of warmth springing from the cold. It was on that night they both met each other, it was love at first sight. But fate had other plans for the lovers who met that star-filled night.
After the death of her parents in a accident, she only had her grandmother. She grew up in a town where even though she was surrounded by people, she felt all alone. She kept herself isolated at all times. She talked little and, only to her grandmother.
Richard was also a lonely soul. His story was imilar to Sarah; he too had lost his parents at a very young age. He spent most of his life in an orphanage and had no friends, no plans, nothing going on in his life. His hair, brown, dark and lustrous. Eyes were the colour of dark roasted beans, he was fair skinned. Everything about him was symmetrical, most obviously his cheekbones, which would extend to the way he smiled.
Few years passed by.
Sarah was twenty-six when she lost her grandmother. It was a very difficult phase for her. After her work hours, she visited her grandmother's grave every day.
In the graveyard, rows of tombstones stood erect in silence to the left and right, in front and behind, like a sea of the dead. Some were crumbled with the weathering of centuries, some were smooth marble with new black writing and laid with floral tributes. Most though were unkempt and surrounded by overgrown weeds, for now, even their mourners had joined them under the clay soil. And up on the hill a new grave had been dug to await its new occupant. The black hearse slowly wended its way down the central lane followed by a procession of black limousines.
The autumn brought forth an early evening, signifying the beginning of long periods of harsh loneliness and numb frostbite. Sarah sat in the corner of a dingy room, her back pressed against the cold tiles and hands shivering along the lined edges of the cracked bricks and fragments of hope. The state of raw abandonment would swallow her sanity whole; dawn by dusk she felt a reason slipping through her frozen fingers.
She continued to visit her grandmother, but this time she was not alone. It was quite strange as for the past few weeks no one had really been in the graveyard but now there was someone. It was Richard.
Both of them stared at each other there was silence for sometime and they both introduced themselves.
He asked, "Why do you come here so often?" Sarah smiled and replied, "I could ask you the same thing."
"Well, I asked you first."
"It might seem funny to you, but this is the only place that makes me feel less lonely. Somewhere all my worries seem to disappear. My grandma is buried here"
Sarah asked him who had he come to visit. It was his father.
Sarah and Richard after that first meeting under the starry night sky met every single day. Both took time out from their busy schedule and met each other as often as possible. Sarah found that Richard was quite like her. She loved spending time with him. They talked every single day. Meeting at five in the evening had become their daily routine.
Richard was in search of his true love and for him Sarah was the answer to that earnest wish. Sarah too couldn't have been happier. Richard was everything she could have wished for too.
Sarah didn’t know what loving someone truly meant until she met him. They had endless conversations, which brought them closer to each other. Sarah said, "When I met you I'd already lost my entire world. How can you hang on to something so incomprehensible? How can you keep pouring love into an abyss? But then there you were. There was something in those brown eyes that was so beautiful, so safe and warm. One look and I knew I was 'home'. I reached out and made the connection, and it was as if it were God's plan, you fell for me too. That first day we talked, just the two of us, I still recall the conversation, the way you made me feel. You didn't know it, but that day you saved me. We are inseparable now, merged into one being, we were one from that day on. But don't the years take their toll, my love? "
Richard then smiled and replied, "Were we ever strangers? I'm not sure we were. That day I first saw you, there was something even then, though I didn't know what. It was like an orange glow bursting over a dark horizon. Something just for us, the only thing that would help us get through this life. It was the dawn of the person I am today, the person I was destined to be. I would give up anything in the world for you, I would do anything to keep you safe."
Richard said,"I want us to belong to each other forever. I was always in search for my soulmate and I decided that until I find her I won't give up and now my unfulfilled desire has finally come true. Sarah will you make me the happiest man in this world? Will you marry me?" Sarah was elated. They decided to get married at a small chapel.
They moved into a new appartment. And that was when it all fell apart. It was newly built, so there weren't many occupants. An old man lived on the ground floor, and them there was a watchman.
The watchman was a very strange, he always stared at Sarah. It made her ery uncomfortable, that cold glare. His eyes would rest on a point, even a person, and he'd stay like longer than the average person would. It was an intimate stare, but something that made you move as far as way from him as possible. And Sarah ran into him every other day.
And gradually the staring turned into stalking. Once Richard would leave for office, he would follow her back His eyes would follow her everywhere. Soon, he was bold enough to follow her around even when Richard was with her.
It was getting too much for her. She told him everything, " He always stares at me and today after you left he came up to me, stalking me. Richard said he would look into the matter the next morning." Richard promised her that he would take care of the matter once he came back from office.
A sliver of moonlight spilled into the room, not enough to ignite the fiery hues of the Indian rug, but enough to navigate between the rough wooden chairs to the exit beyond. The waxing moon was mirrored in the almost unruffled surface and where a ripple curled it the tiny crest glittered like the white flame.
But she could not stop thinking about it at night. She woke up to drink water. Then she noticed something very strange. She saw a mirror under the table. The mirror was small and cheap, about the size of the cell phones Sarah gazed at her reflection but she did not see Richard.
She saw her reflection in the mirror but not Richard's. She started panicking and went down running. The watchman asked, "What happened madam?" she said my husband is there but I cannot see his reflection in the mirror. The watchman replied, "What husband? We haven't seen anyone. You stay here alone madam". But yes it is strange that you keep talking to someone every time you enter or leave the building.
Sarah's thoughts started accelerating inside her head. Her breaths came in gasps and she feels like she would black out. Her heart started hammering inside her chest as it belonged to a rabbit running for its skin. Everything around her spun and she squats on the floor, trying to make everything slow to something her brain and body could not cope with. She felt so sick.
The watchman said, "Are you, okay madam!?". He called the ambulance but it was too late. blackness... creeping blackness... She was on the floor in a ball- the fetal position. Blackness...she was gone. FOREVER!
The reason everyone stared at her in the apartment was that she did not talk to anybody but an invisible man who did not exist. Her coffin was buried between her grandmother's and the fifty-year-old grave of Richard and his parents. Richard's unfulfilled desire to find a perfect soulmate was finally fulfilled.
