S9: "A Cup of Coffee and A Scoop of Vanilla"

It was a sunny day and was around 11 am, I went to CCD, ordered a cup of cappuccino and I sat on the chair where WE always sit.

I was sitting there peeping through the window into the petrol bunk next to it.

‘Oi’, he smiled. ‘Here’, he gave me the two extra sugar packets which I asked for. He sat in front of me callously eating the vanilla scoops.

My eyes laid totally on him, blinking slowly and feeling every breath seeing him and I don’t know why this happens, whenever I see him, the rest of the world will get blurred. May be I should ask my eyes about it or even better I should ask my heart.

‘I am so happy for you baby’, he said finishing his first scoop. He looked at me and smiled.

Till then I was not feeling any drops of happiness. I was selected for an MNC yesterday. From the moment he said he was happy, I was feeling all the happiness at once. It was like he just opened the gates of my happiness dam and it started flowing euphorically.

I smiled and said,’ I want to say something. I wanted to say this since a long time and I want to say it now’.

He smiled in a way that he already knew what I was going to say.

‘What?’, he asked expecting the words to spill out of my mouth.

My heart started thumping so hard that my eardrums were completely filled with its sound. My eyes started to count each and every corner of that place and were avoiding his eyes.

‘It’s ok! Tell me, what is the matter?’ he asked again.

I finally gathered each and every beat of my heart and try to pull the feelings out of my mouth which were hiding deep inside my heart.

‘We are best friends since two years and umm .. I want to say that I want you more. I want to spend with you till my last breath and’, I paused and took a deep breath and said ‘I love you Achyuth’.

My hands were shivering and by hearing these words he kept looking down for a few minutes and filled the atmosphere with deep silence. I started worrying. The what-if’s took over my brain and started terrifying me ‘What if he say no’ ,’ What if he ends the relation with me’, ‘what if he just walks away’, ‘what if something fall into my coffee’, ‘what’.

‘Achyu’, I said keeping all the what-if’s aside.

‘Ha’, he replied looking up straight into my eyes.

He stood up. I felt like he is going to leave. My heart beats were nowhere in control.

He looked into my eyes and kneeled down in front of everyone. He took my hands and said, ‘Will you marry me?’.

That one sentence stopped all my senses and I don’t know how to depict my happiness. I showed him with my happy tears and said ‘Yes’.

He kissed on my hand. I never felt so special. My brain kept searching for the words in the dictionary to explain how am I feeling while my heart was somewhere in the clouds and its every beat was chanting his name.

He was saying something about our future but I was so lost in his eyes that no words were reaching my ears.

Suddenly a voice came from nowhere. ‘Mam your coffee’. I blinked my eyes and turned to my left. The waitress came with my coffee and placed it on the table. I was dazed and kept looking at her without any word. ‘Mam Are you ok’, she said.

I shook my head and stammered, ‘Yeah I am fine’.

‘You want anything else mam’, she asked bending forward.

‘No thank you’, I said.

I shifted my eyes to the chair in front of me. It was empty. It was missing someone whom it had had seen with me a hundred times before. My eyes were wet and they fell on the words on the coffee cup.

My lips smiled after reading the words, ‘A lot can happen over a coffee’.

Oh yes. It was last year I was sitting with him making fun and mixing my coffee in his vanilla. And today I was sitting alone without him and my coffee without its vanilla. My heart which hopped on to the roller coaster ride with him fell down on the ground. It was injured very badly and was still recovering.

I bended forward and said, ‘Coffee, I know what u r feeling. U may be wondering where your vanilla is, it may be somewhere happy with its new partner. It’s just you and me now’.

I finished my coffee looking at the empty chair and took a lungful of air and moved from there.