“The fault in our stars,” he chuckled. She looked at him as
a murderer of the moment and went back to reading. Their flight was delayed,
while he was getting bored, she almost drowned in her book.
“I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up,” he
disturbed her again with a quote from the book and waited for her to complete
it.
“And I would like to minimize the causalities, Okay?” she
completed it with a smile.
“Okay,” he smiled back.
“I didn’t know you had this quote still in your skull, what else do you remember?” he has her full attention.
“I remember that no one told Hazel Grace that she was not a grenade, instead she was a soap bubble,” he chipped wafers in his mouth.
She waited for him to explain. He didn’t. But kept looking at her.
She gave it a thought and put her opinion on it “Soap bubble? Yeah! I guess. She surely short-lived but didn’t hurt anyone. Like a soap bubble, she floated through everyone’s life and spread happiness. Everyone around her carried the same spark in their eyes that one can see in a kid’s eyes, laughing and clapping at a soap bubble,” she closed the book and ran her fingers on the cover, as if feeling it.
“No, I meant somebody blew through her mother to bring her into life,” he laughed. “But you make sense too.”
She laughed with him, and declared him a total jerk. Totally unaware of the fact that he had seen her cry while reading the book. And, he chose to be a boy first that could make her smile with lame jokes before being a man who could comfort her in his arms and wipe her tears off. Because, wiping off tears is soothing, but making her believe that tears do not exist… is a whole new story.
-Himanshu Appie
Chhabra
