It was the first thought that came to her as she woke up. He was gone. And, soon, this bedroom, the house in whose eastern corner it sat, and the tiny garden outside with its gnarled old red hibiscus and the half-grown mango tree they had planted together, all those would be gone as well. It was the strangest feeling ever. How is one supposed to feel when one’s life is no longer one’s own?

Kyuhyun closed the book and took a long breath. He was never much of a reader. It intrigued him that out of all the books he could have picked up from that pavement, it had to be this one. He closed his eyes to take stack of the wafts of emotion bulldozing him. And then, she happened…

Her hair was the wind that the soul can’t fathom. Her laughter was like a wind chime on a raggedy mountain. Her footsteps were the echoes of a long forgotten era. Her eyes were the portal to universes unimagined. And her words were the swords that were destined to plunder him.

“You look positively drunk. Can I have something of what you’ve drunk?” she asked me, on a crowded metro. Kyuhyun never knew music could be spoken… if he was taken out of the list, as his now ex-boyfriend would say.

She inched close to where Kyuhyun was, leaning against the door, and whispered into his ears, “I know the most spectacular place to drink.” And like all the clichéd romances, he had no idea that she would become the reason for his existence in the days to come. Or at least the reason why he decided to continue existing anyway.

“Why?” asked Kyuhyun.

“Why you ask me? Why? Why does the sea crave the ocean? Why does the fish fall for the bait? Why does the addict pine for the next hit? Because they can’t help it. It’s instinct.”

“So, your instinct tells you to walk up to random strangers and offer to get drunk with them?”

“My instinct tells me to come save you.”

“Who says I need saving?”

“Don’t you?”

The stars blinked down on them, nodding in approval. Venus was being her usual self, pretending to be something she’s not. And the city lights begged Kyuhyun not to go back home.

They were on the roof of a 20 storeyed building, trespassing their way to bliss. Kyuhyun laid there recounting the evening he had gone through. It’s not everyday you realize that the person you were together with for half a decade turns out to be in love with someone else. It’s not everyday that the world you knew as a uni-dimensional harbor of ecstasy and joy crumbles into a non-existent pile of rubble and ice. It’s not everyday you meet your own demon moonlighting as an angel to rescue you, only to throw you off the edge at the perfect moment.

He should have known that this was coming. He should have been prepared for this, Kyuhyun thought, like one prepares for a storm one hears vaguely about the radio while doing chores. But he got too busy living in the now, enjoying the last bits of moments he got to spend with him, in their house, doing things only they did, living their life, the only life he had enjoyed living to the fullest. He didn’t know how to be apart from what he already was- a husband, a lover, a best friend, a guardian keeping a close eye on the little mindless things that mattered to them, to him. And soon, he’d just become a name, maybe someone who won’t even be remembered. And despite the desperate sense of loss plaguing him entirely, he felt a peculiar sense of calmness descending upon him.

“Here we go.” She opened a can of beer and drank it in one go. She shivered a little “I haven’t done this in a while.” She opened another can and kept in front of Kyuhyun’s face, bringing him back from his thoughts.

Kyuhyun put his book aside and took the can.

“Look at that star, burning like a fireball.” She pointed at a star with glee like a child.

“That’s not a star. It’s the planet Venus. On clear nights it’s usually mistaken to be a star. But look carefully, it’s not twinkling like the others.” Kyuhyun corrected her.

“Ah. There’s no fooling you, is there?” She took a sip and looked at him. The kohl smeared eyes burnt a hole into his consciousness. Kyuhyun looked away. Why does she have this effect on me? He wondered, failing to come up with any conclusive rationalization for it.

“Learning it the hard way,” was all Kyuhyun could muster up as a reply. But she didn’t seem to be paying attention. It seemed like she was somewhere else.

“Don’t you think it’s sad when we assume that someone is putting up a charade, but in reality they’re just being themselves? It is in fact, we who aren’t paying enough attention to decipher the truth. How easy it is to blame someone to cover up our own defects?”

Kyuhyun said nothing. They kept drinking. And she kept talking about things. Things that put the stars to shame. Things that made a dent on Kyuhyun’s shell. Things that have a way of staying with you, eons and eons from then on.

“When I was a little girl, I loved playing with dragonflies. There was this one specific place at the playground which had an abandoned slide. It used to be swarmed by dragonflies for some mystical reason, every spring. The best time of my day used to be sliding down that thing, imagining being carried by the dragon flies. And when I’d lie down on the ground, and the sun would glisten its way through the over protective branches of the trees, the wings of the dragonflies seemed to be lit up into a million glow lamps, fluttering incessantly. And at that moment I realized, magic is real.” She sat up and stared down at Kyuhyun, her eyes held him prisoner. “Do you believe in magic?”

Kyuhyun kept staring at her. Through his peripheral vision, he could see the stars, and lights. He could feel the gentle wind making love to his body. He closed his eyes to soak it all in.

“No.” Kyuhyun lied. But he couldn’t tell her the truth, he felt vulnerable enough already. She made him feel so powerless under the hold of her gaze, like he was not the master of his own self. She had this incomprehensible power over him that felt suffocating and liberating at the same time. No person had ever made him feel that way, except him… Why am I thinking about him again? Kyuhyun slightly shook his head.

She kept staring at Kyuhyun; he could feel her pretty eyes all over his face, even with his closed. “Well, that’s a pity.”

She stood up and walked towards the railing. Kyuhyun got up and followed her, like a moth to an enthralling glow of light. She took out a cigarette and lit it up. Dragging in the nicotine infested gust of air through her dark-red stained lips and letting out the smoke with a sigh mixed in, she casually let her body hang mid-way from the railing, her eyes taking in the distant hassles of the world below.

“If you wish to fall to death, please do it somewhere I am not around. I’ve witnessed too much death and blood and I don’t wish to elongate that list.” Kyuhyun casually murmured, leaning with his back against the railing.

“You haven’t witnessed enough.” Her body still mid-way suspended towards gravity.

“You don’t know that.”

“You haven’t witnessed enough.” She repeated.

“Do you want to change that?”

“It’s not for me to change things. That job is solely reserved for Time. And when Time arrives, us puppets must simply obey.”

“And that’s all that we are? Puppets obeying the whims of time?”

“No. Only the puppets are puppets. They have to. That’s their job. You don’t need to worry about that. You aren’t a puppet.”

“Then what am I?”

“I can’t tell you that. I haven’t been told to do so. If and when I am tasked with that particular job, nothing would bring me more pleasure than to fly to you to tell you all about it.”

“Okay. I see. Fine, I’ll humor you. You enjoy being a Puppet?”

“Sometimes. Most times actually. But I want to be something more. I want to be Time itself.”

“How can one become time?”

“Just like one becomes anything that there is to become: Perseverance. And a real gut wrenching proclivity that doesn’t begin to fade out. In essence we are all time. We measure our lives, not by years and months and days that have gone trailblazing into the mist. What we really analyze in retrospect on our deathbeds or death rides if you will, are the people who came, went and stayed. The people who made things a struggle, the people who made things an aid in the struggle, the people who just were, and the people who weren’t. What is time if not just a point of reference into the foresight or hindsight rather the sight itself.”

“Then you are already time. What’s there to become?” Kyuhyun mocked her.

“Oh but there’s a difference between time and Time. A subtle one but the difference is so impactful that it holds the power to yield non-existent strings into tides which chart the highs and lows of the natal fluid that powers this existence, along with all the other existences that have blossomed to be.” She said seriously.

Kyuhyun shook his head “Well, I guess I need another beer to process that.” And he started walking away from the railing.

“You say that as if you can process my words any less right now.”

Kyuhyun stopped and let out a deep breath. He asked himself why he had decided to follow his whims, rather follow this stranger’s whims, this night of all nights. May be pondering for those queries, in search of meaning and reasons, he turned back to look at her. And she had transformed.

The girl Kyuhyun was conversing with had black hair with silver streaks till her shoulders, wearing a short white dress till her knees with converse shoes, black eyes.

But the girl Kyuhyun was staring at right now made him question if that was a girl at all. She had long silver hair that ran past her waist, streaked with black, here and there. She had on a flimsy, shiny cloth around her body, the cloth not entirely shaped in the likeness of a dress. But the most striking feature about her was not the altered clothing and hair. The most striking feature about her were the eyes, which were distinctly red, as red as . Also the fact that she had an ethereal glow that made her resemble a ghost, probably the ones which flit through one's childhood in books, dreams and real life, made her both terrifying and enthralling at the same time.

“You were going to kill yourself today to escape life. Now you want to escape death by shunning life and slipping into the crevices of your impaired consciousness. What changed?”

“You.”

And by that Kyuhyun didn’t just mean her change of appearance. He sank to the ground, on his knees, and stared at the nothingness beneath him. The terrace floor was as grey as the night sky at a distance. He unfurled his fists and gazed at his palms. His palmist friend who takes a lot of pride in her clairvoyance once told him that he has a strong life line while pointing at the deep line that cut across my palm. He could see that mark getting fainter and fainter. He could feel himself getting lighter along with that mark, each second dwindling away life, his breaths slowing down with each passing second. The heaviness of the world upon him seemed to be lifted and he instinctively looked up at her.

They weren’t at the terrace anymore.

There was darkness all around and nothing else. She stood there looking like a Goddess and Kyuhyun bore his gaze on her wraith-like self, looking like he was going to break into a hymn of devotion any second.

“Sometimes we experience life in ways that are inexplicable through human words.”

And there was music. Right at that moment, a melody so divine yet so very human, singed across the darkness and started wafting through the air. It doesn’t make sense if someone thinks of them logically but logic took a backseat the moment he agreed to follow this girl/ghost/goddess, into her world leaving behind his.

“And our eyes are more deceiving than any illusionary object ever conceived into being.”

At that exact moment Kyuhyun witnessed the birth of light from darkness, small floating bits of color and light that manifested out of nowhere. They were like those feathery cottony flowers one blows into the wind but the difference was that they were aglow, and how!?

“But the biggest problem lies in the fact we try to make sense out of everything that we set our senses upon. Experiencing a sensation and making sense out of it are two very different things and sometimes, we just need to detach ourselves from the cage of meaning and explanations. Sometimes we just need to let go. But sometimes, you need to take back what you let go off because who knows, you might have let go of something which you'l