All the way up and all the way down

Steps

Steps that take her up and bring her down and on certain days manage to leave her at intersections and crossovers where she bumps into a former lover. They share a friendly hug. It gets awkward at first and the awkwardness slowly melts with time when they started talking about Toby and Mathias their friends from the library.

Toby had once let out his plump faced hamster from the bag causing a stir in the library. The hamster kept hopping from table to table, and finally when he landed on the librarian's desk, they both had an eye to eye moment causing the stern faced librarian to topple from her seat and let out a loud shriek.

"Where did he vanish? said a baffled Toby. 

They all had then searched for him high and low, underneath lined bookshelves, spaces between antique looking cupboards and peeped into wastepaper baskets. But they couldn't locate him and had finally resigned to the fact thinking that maybe the poor fellow had gotten around making a nice home for himself in the midst of books that carried the faint scent of war stories and stories of unrequited love locked within.

She wondered about him then and she still wonders at times whether he had shown some refined manners by not going around tearing pages and on second thoughts if he did, whether he had made a nice makeshift bed from those very pile of pages. He would have then sunk deeper into the mound seeking warmth on rainy days when it kept pouring really hard outside.

Steps

A day she remembers climbing nearly a hundred steps, that went winding all the way up with tufts of green grass growing in patches at the sides. Once on top the view from the hillock was magnificent. The depth of the city with terracotta tiles as roofs over houses displayed a brown hush everywhere. In the background the sky kept changing its colours from a livid orange to a tempered brown and by evening the daylight had shifted to a purple haze knocking off the sun behind. But the evening mostly carried with it the fragrance of jasmine buds growing in clumps beneath her feet. 

Couples sat in various corners, their bodies fitting snugly in stone-walled arches, arms and legs colliding with one another. She simply sat on a battered ledge drinking in the view. Occasionally, she watched those couples from the corner of her eye with a growing agitation fuelling inside her; waiting for the boy whom she loved then and who she knew was not going to turn up.

But with the shift in time, she felt subdued and a sense of calm settled over her agitated nerves. The boy, the lecture that she had missed to come here all the way, her evening coffee, friends from college all felt hazy in the background and what took centre-stage then was the horizon, the melee of houses below, the rocky valley and the sounds of exotic birds that filled up the warm afternoon air. 

In her own company she realised that sometimes it is the ordinary things in life that can bring you sheer bliss.

Lovers can always wait.