Sometimes, strangers are better than fiction...

There'll be no angst in this post. No alcohol either. I came here to record an unexpectedly pleasant saturday evening. A time i usually spend with fictional characters. Or a high level programming language. This time, it was the company of a stranger. A stranger i've known, for 3 days in all. Who i'll meet again, in 3 years maybe, or a little later. A polite hello. A curt handshake. A cup of coffee each. One with sugar, one without. And then a drive, supposedly to Palo Alto. A signal jump, a wrong turn, and a pretty road that took us to a destination we weren't headed for. An unmarked space with two parked cars. A trail. A real heavy breeze, that made us need the sight of speech, as much as the sound of it, to make sense of the spoken word. A bird whose name we did not know, whose flight we still hung on and followed. The just risen moon, inside which, she saw a rabbit, i saw a squid, and she spoke of a friend, who always saw a mother and a child. I've never looked for forms inside the moon. I call them craters and leave them at it. Bata chappals, wind chill, the setting sun and the growing hunger, made us head back to the car. Eventually, Palo Alto was reached. Dishes whose names i can't remember, to save my life, were consumed. And good byes and good lucks exchanged. Strangely, the evening seemed whole in it's own right. Random. No context. No obligatory future or direction. Just it. Like watching, possibly, the only show of a feel good movie, seeing the credits roll, walking out, smiling and satisfied.

I think back of Kodachaadri. Another geography. Another whole set of events. But a very similar after taste. I'll keep it for another time.