"Do you ever feel like life is just screwing you over? I mean, not being able to speak and all." He asked.
"Sometimes," I gestured. "I feel like it's screwing everyone in one way or another and we just....let it."
"Yeah, I'm screwed pretty much too, despite what you say," he cocked a brow at me. I knew exactly what he was talking about, he was referring to when I said—referred—that being deaf is actually easy. I don't see a reason yet that could make me change my answer.
"I have a hypothetical question," I waved.
He nodded.
"What would you do when you were given a chance to trade one of your organs in exchange for your hearing?"
"Well, um, nothing I guess. I've pretty much learned the value of simplest of the organs after I lost my hearing sense. Now it doesn't matter what I've lost, I can't just give up on something that has stood by my side in exchange for something that left me in my righteous."
I can't say I wasn't impressed. I pursed my lips together. His eyes gleamed in the dancing spectrum the sun offered.
"How old were you when you got cancer?" He asked, releasing heaved breath in the end.
"Thirteen," I waved my fingers. "I had my auditions that day when I chocked on my own blood vomit and passed out. Later, doctors found out that I had cancer brooding in my throat since the age of five and due to excessive practices lately, my pharynx had gone even worse."
He twitched his lips, the glistening in his eyes intact.
"So what did you get to make up for it?" he asked.
"What?" I raised a brow.
"Which sense did you develop after losing your, you know, voice...as a compensation? You know what they say, right, that you have one sense hyperactive to make up for the one you've lost?"
This was weird, "Uh, I don't know. I haven't really paid much attention to it. And to be honest, I don't believe it."
"Oh, there it is. There is why you still haven't got your silver lining, you don't believe in it. See, this is how it works actually. You have to believe in magic for it to work."
"Well, where I come from, people are put in asylums for excessively believing in magic," I cracked into a gale of laughter after having waved that. He chuckled along with me till I stopped.
His face tightened all of sudden and his jaw tensed, "Magic is where it is valued and longed to be felt. Flying in the air and playing with fire don't just qualify as magic....it could be anything that could make things right. Like right now, I have no idea about the repercussions of kissing you, the reason I'm working my might to keep myself from doing it, no matter how much it's killing me."
"You're right, it's magic that you're not kissing a girl you met five minutes ago."
"Do you really believe that?"
"What?"
"...that we've met just five minutes ago. Are you sure we haven't met before or had been together for eternity and separated with the gust of winds of time?" He stared deep into my eyes. It was like he was trying to get beyond and beyond inside my eyes.
I scoffed. I had this uncanny feeling that I've met him before. And now his sentence, it all made me so nervous, no matter how absurd he just sounded.
He suddenly rose, "You know what? I should get going. Meet me at my beach house, here's my card. I'll show you something that'll help you strengthen your belief." He eyed me enigmatically and left. I had his card in my hand and I looked towards the fountain and then that mysterious red duck, but it wasn't there now. I looked all over the little pond but it was nowhere.
I looked at the card he'd handed me and there it was—his name, Sahil; his profession—a traveler. And then at the bottom, there was subtitle or something, 'I'll show you the world, just hold my hand.'
At the right top corner of that card was the year the card was published in—1901.
I kept sitting there, in front of the fountain which was now, agonizingly, mundane. No spectrum was dancing now; the tiger gargoyle was as if it had been through several deaths.
I liked it much better when I was with him.
***
