Skin Deep Memory

John Keats said that touch has a memory.

Anamika sits in the shade of the big oak tree – breathing in the fresh air, absorbing the man-less silence in her bones. Mindlessly feeling the grass blades beneath her palm as a couple of Mynahs argue on a branch above her. She smiles as she remembers a childhood fable – sighting a pair of Mynahs was the sign of finding true love. The need to add the suffix ‘true’ before love to make it sound more valid and pure always baffled her. Shouldn’t love be enough of a word in itself to portray the magnanimity and sanctity of the emotions, in all its chaos?

Deep breath. She was getting carried away. It always happened when somebody talked about love. So many of her friends never understood why she could never just say ‘I love you’ to them as casually as they all did. They never realised why these three little words mattered so much to her, how they were precious enough that she could never just utter them without meaning it with her whole existence. How it always reminded her of him.

As she gazes at the darkening sky, she tries to remember how he looked. It comes in fragments – his all-teeth-showing smile, that deep dimple in his left cheek, his unruly hair. She doesn’t know what color his eyes were. She could never look into them long enough for the fear of revealing everything. She remembers the sound of his chuckle though – all the cadences of it quite clearly – because he always found her funny. He’d chuckled right after he had said, “I love you,” because I had “looked ready to bolt”. She remembers him chuckling as she eventually did run away.

A cold breeze breaks her out of her reverie as the grass beneath her palm shivers. Incidentally, all the hair on her skin stands on end.

“You shiver like the grass on a windy day when I touch you. Why’s that?”

As the Mynahs come down from the branches to argue in front of her, she wonders whose touch haunted Keats to bury it in his skin and call it a memory.