As Def Leppard said ...

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She walked up to me with a mug of tea. The steam rising from the mug distorted her face. She seemed tired and I couldn't help but notice the wound near her neck on the collar bone. Normally  I would have enquired with a lot of concern  about her well being. But the previous day was Valentines day and she had taken off. So I hesitated. Ultimately I gave into my 9-to-6 senses and kept quiet.

That evening, she walked up to me with a mug of tea. The steam rising from the mug distorted her face, which did not seem happy. As she came closer, I realized it was not just unhappiness, her face seemed tight with anger. In such situations, I used to throw a PJ at her and that relaxed her a bit. I tried the same tactic. "What is the one word that describes someone sitting and eating?" When she did not respond for a thirty seconds, I lost my patience and gave away the answer "Seating." Her stare got harder. The eyes tightened so much that her eyeball reduced to a eye-point. I wanted wave and check if she could see anything with that point but thought it better to let go. I brought concern on my face and asked with concern in my voice "What happened?"

 

It seemed, those were the very words she was waiting to hear. She started talking with a "Those" and then went on to say words that I refrain to use here before coming back to what she wanted to say. The following is a censored version of what she said "Those ... think that this wound on my neck is a love bite!" I have been told spontaneity is a good thing. A doctor once recommended a medicine called "Spongra" to increase my spontaneity. Everyone who knows me thought of me as a boring, controlled and totally unspontaneous person. Those good hearted fellows do not realize that the issue I have is not with spontaneity but about being spontaneous at the wrong time. Like that one time, I spontaneously took off my hands off my two wheeler as I was rolling along at 20. The vehicle spontaneously lost control and I spontaneously found myself sprawled on the road. Of course, my knee spontaneously started bleeding and I spontaneously felt ache arising out of different parts of my body. The only saving grace was that a crowd of laughing faces did not spontaneously appear. Instead, when I reached my destination, a friend's house, a plate of cooked crabs spontaneously appeared in front of me. So I take this opportunity to inform all that I am spontaneous but only the wrong moments.

 

The moment after she mentioned the words "love bite" was one such moment. (I realize that love bite is also referred to as something that sounds like Hichki but the word sounds too juvenile to be used in this serious piece. Beside , Def Leppard did not sing a song named "Hichkeeeeeeeee".) I should have nodded my head from side to side, had a grave expression on my face and let out a couple of "tsk tsk". Instead I said "Oh! It isn't?". She turned around and stared at me. The eye-point transitioned through the eyeball stage and ended up in an eye-sun state. If scientist had peered into her eye with one of their instruments, they would have actually seen a couple of Hydrogen atoms making love to each other. It was so bright that I looked away. That's when I noticed her hand move. I cant call it a movement; more of a twitch. At that point, I realised what Peter Parker meant when he said "my spider sense was tingling". In my case, my sixth sense was hammering nails into my head. I took heed and stepped away and moved my body backwards. If life had a slow motion switch, people would have remembered Keanu Reeves from Matrix. The content of the mug flew through the air, missing my face by a whisker.

 

Nothing to worry about though. We are friends still. From time to time, we laugh about the incident. Of course, it was not exactly a happy ending. In the process of moving back, I fell onto a friend who was approaching me. He fell, broke a bone and ended up on the bed for three months. The prospect of spending three months on bed without going to office should have made him happy but his marriage got postponed by six months and this made him grouchy. Understandable, very understandable!