A Date

The moment:

After dinner, ready to part, we said goodbyes. Then, while proceeding towards waiting car she turned around and stepped closer to me, and before I could anticipate and be ready, she hugged me.

Leaving me startled and dazed she moved away, and turned to keep her vanity bag in the waiting car. Heavy pleats of her skirt floated in the air shaping it like a blue mountain, the sharp cut of her plain white top made her back look like a milky river arriving in a plane and flowing between the lines narrow at the brim of her skirt and broad at her shoulder. She seemed to me to be a glorious fragment of earth, alive, beautiful, generous, and benign. 

The hug:

I was still soaked in the sensation of the hug. Floating with its memory in lightness. As though I had held a flower in my palm and pressed it to my cheek; filled with tenderness I felt immensely powerful (for, what is tenderness if not how powerful looks at the fragile with affection).

In my arms when she was, I did not feel her weight; I was in embrace of air, scented pulsating air. And I, fearing that air’s exquisite sculpting in her body shape might get disturbed by my pressing on to her, held her ever so slightly. She felt to me so small, so light, so fragile, something precious pressed against my chest, despite being a full woman that she was. Feminine in bloom is all tenderness, free of barbs and rough edges. Her arms around my neck, elbows resting on my shoulders, she slightly reclining towards me, her feather like touch- all sensation no weight. 

With my face over her shoulder and eyes behind her back I could see that exquisite heel of her right shoe raised, sharp and shiny like a rifle bullet, and taut calf muscles of her curvaceous lower leg emerging from the shoe like an art work, wrapped in the skin that was perfect piece of silk held stretched by two perfect lines of tendons, ready. Many a poems were buried there on that skin to be uncovered by sensual touch of the tip of a dreamer’s finger, or lips; depending on the depth of his devotion, for if he chooses to touch or kiss the feet of his goddess. 

Her cheek so close to mine, I could feel the warmth in her blood through her skin. Mild and sweet though it was, it made my face shimmer. 

Her scent, which now will be my definition of a woman for ever, in those few moments transformed itself into my deepest memory. 

I remember soft exhale of her breath on my neck. I can not recall if I was breathing or stopped; perhaps it was she who having taken my breath away, was breathing for both of us. Or, in that embrace I was nourished by her life force and did not need breathing of my own!

The spell:

These thoughts mesmerised me. They were as pleasurable as the moments of their origin. 

Then she looked back and saw me. Her effect was written all over me. And, either as an act of kindness-to cure me, or like an enchantress giving final touches to her spell, she hugged me one more time. 

- Pulastya