Chemistry

It was a moment she had not anticipated ever. Romantic novellas were her bedtime treat when the burr bugged her brain: but they were soporific tranquillizers, not real books. So it was that in her declining years, she imagined stories of romantic trysts for herself, imagining a time when life would begin again, and when she would regress to a start-up twenty. Nice. Almost as tranquillizing as the books that dished them out.

Very often she would try to imagine, wonder, if that ‘chemistry’ that kept the romance together in the books happened to her in real life what she would do. But it was an imagination that she could not fathom. She gave up, since it was beyond the realm of the real and in books of course, it strung the poor thread of a plot together to the inevitable end.

But it happened, and when it did, she could not believe it. “It is in my imagination,” she thought to herself. Deprived of the oxygen of a life, she was beginning to imagine reality in unreal situations. Or so she thought.
But she could not have imagined the first look. The first pull of something that told her this was ‘the’ zing. The something that made her look at his face again to wonder why it made her look again. Not a handsome face, but a pleasant one. Not certainly tall, dark and handsome – for he was a bit stocky, fair and light-eyed to boot.

And then it happened again. The fine thread that made the link was getting clearer by the minute. This was something more. There was electricity in two hands that came close to touching but did not. There was a buzz in the smiles and the conversations. The fine thread that was almost transparent began to acquire form and a steady shape – it was a line that connected and each time the connection was made, there was a zap. It could not be ignored anymore.

She put down the book which had lost its lustre and tried imagination. This time, it just wouldn’t work. There were no stories or situations that would fit this one. For there it was, moments and moments in time, of a link, an electricity and a puzzled acceptance of this happening.

Once the acceptance came, she shrugged and relaxed. There was nothing, truly nothing she could do about it. For he was a twenty to her thirty-five and there would be plenty others he would surely connect better with, perhaps of his own age?

As she brooded, he came up to where she was seated, at the lounger by the poolside and smiled. The electricity crackled and their eyes met. “May I join you?” he asked.