The things she'd touched lie around the house like fragments from a vivid, picturesque dream whose details are fading fast in the morning light.

Multi-coloured tourist guide-books full of meaningless rebates and proclivity to hyperbole that she'd collected diligently in the course of her month-long stay... The plastic daisies she'd rearranged in strict twin-colour combination at odds with my multi-colour bunches... Spices sorted and arrayed in idiot-proof order in the kitchen... My laundry all done and folded in the closet... Her pale yellow warning note on the burnt out fourth coil of my stove with the skulls she couldn't draw looking like twisted smileys... The bottle of Italian white wine from Wednesday night's dinner when I couldn't take my eyes off the candle-light dancing on her face... The jazz compilation on the DVD player from which she played Sophie Millman's Rocket Love again, again and yet again during our evenings at home... There's another strand of her hair in the washbasin - yesterday, she'd have cursed under her breath and flushed it away impatiently. Her potrait by a street artist lying next to the TV somehow seems more special than the scores of photographs of our Juneful of joy...

And now everything lies strewn like toys after the child has been put to sleep... Like it rained here all night - the warm, gentle yet incessant rain that trickles softly down like milk from a mother's breast... And in drying puddles and fading rivulets, the wet earth will try despairingly to hold on to memories through a long punishing summer.

Last evening again, she cried and I looked away. She had been brave - full of willed cheer like a little soldier, laughing at things that weren't really funny. But when the taxi radio played "Leaving on a jet plane..."  on the way to the airport, she hid her face on my shoulder and cried. It was too fucking coincidental...! If it had been the John Denver original, I would have joked about how it was she who was traveling, not me! But it was Chantal Kreviazuk with her strange penetrating voice like saxophone and single malt on a quiet evening. I stared into the setting sun over Lasalle as the taxi sped on. She said she hated airplanes because they took people away. She has said that before. I smirked and said they also bring people together. I, too, have said it before. Our's is a relationship steeped in goodbyes. Nobody told us that with two and a half years of practice, they'd only become increasingly difficult.

How long can two lovelorn lives keep flowing adrift of each other with just the promise of a tomorrow together keeping them from falling to pieces? I don't know! All these careful, calculated decisions we make with our meticulous and mercenary minds - how they come to tug at our hearts later!

On my way back, a reminder she'd kept on my mobile popped up dutifully to call me pet names and tell me she loved me... I fought down a strange hot gulp clutching at my throat and smiled stupidly into the dusk... May be, we need this pain to realize how much we need our loved ones to complete us. May be, that's just a hollow excuse to let me sleep alone on "your side" of the bed that night. I winced this morning when I almost called her name from the shower to ask for the towel that I could afford to forget all of last month. And as I picked my shirt, I saw that she had left her new blue saree behind. She hadn't worn it even once. I smile indulgently... Now, we'll have to wait till she's back here next April - the saree and I.

Goodbyes hurt and the pangs slowly morph into the vacuosness of waiting. But then, the only good part about being apart is that every day is a day closer to another exultant reunion with a crushing hug that lasts an eternity. Every dry meaningless morning spent staring into a laptop screen is another step toward those halcyon days on that mountain villa where we'll start a family one day... Every day spent apart is another day closer to where life shall have finally earned it's rest in a loving lap...

Till then, one day at a time...