Thread by @Shayonnita15

When my grandmother told me of her first love - he was always a beautiful memory. He wore pin-stripped trousers, and had a particular fondness for honey in his cha.

Thread.

Desperately he'd held her hand one dew-dripped morning, with the sound of bells that would never ring for them echoing in the background: And that was the heady height of their intimacy.

He wrote her letters, in gushing bengali—

1.

—the alphabets rushing over eachother in excitement to reach her.

She opened them under gulmohars, with their red blossoms as excited as her trembling lips to read the words.

She told me of how he attended her marriage, & then, after she moved houses with her two children—

2.

—she lost that little parchment where he had scribbled, bitterly, a series of numbers that she had never been brave enough to use.

When my grandmother told me of her first love, it was like a page from my favourite book, that I was required to colour, and dream up.

3.

It was a romance that I could raise with my imagination.

My grandma's first love did live on, till her last breath, in her memory; and now, mine. He wasn't just a real person, he was a story. He wasn't a face, he was love's memory.

That's what made it magical.

4.

When I tell you of my first love, you'll pull out Facebook, search him, as I talk of walks by railroads. You'll read him, know him, judge him by his faces and filters, as I tell you tales of how I cried by tinted windows.

5.

When I'll tell you of my first love, you'll "Insta him". You'll decide upon his entire character, and whether he deserved me—not from my words, but from his tweets, his muted pictures.

My stories of him, my memories, will be haze only.

Where, is the magic in that?

Fin.