And they met again........

He wiped the raindrops from his brow while carefully running his fingers through his carefully gelled hair which he had worked into a la Elvis mop only minutes back. Gosh how he hated the rain it got to him in a very oddly irritating way, it had poured every freaking day that he had forgotten to get an umbrella to office. As he got into the elevator cursing Murphy’s Law he heard someone shouting asking him to hold up the elevator. He had barely slid his hand out of his pockets to the partially broken ‘Door open’ button when he had a large camera shoved into his face. Following it entered this girl drenched in these outlandish bohemian clothes looking as if she had been outside for hours. Gosh another one of those hopeless romantics who loved to drench in the rain he thought.

“Lovely day outside aint it” she said.
“Looks all the same to me, I don’t like the rain anyways”.
An odd moment of silence followed during which he thought it was kinda rude of him to react in that fashion.
“You look like one heck of a photographer” he said pointing to the camera.
“You must have me confused with someone with some potential; I am just running an errand for a friend of mine to whom this belongs.”
Hmmm that camera thing wasn’t making any head away.
After another moment of uncomfortable silence she said “I am Sally” extending her hand.
He wiped his hand on his trousers and then extending his hand said “The name’s Potter, Harry Potter”.
“For real?"she asked looking incredulously at him.
“Naah, even though it would have made a heck of a story for you, actually it’s a rather more staid and boring Harry Johnson”.
Before he could say anything else the elevator stopped at her floor and she stepped outside disappearing from his view. As he was thinking of running after her, her head bobbed back into view as she blurted “Harry Johnson actually sounds so much better” and then she broke into a smile, a smile that was very childlike, smile unblemished by all the things that were wrong in the world outside the elevator, a smile that was one without a care in the world, as the elevator door closed.

Love stories with sad endings leave a lot of emotional baggage and broken hearts, love stories with happy endings leave behind grandchildren to whom you narrate tall tales of love overcoming all obstacles decades later but its stories like these that somehow make place in some comfortable corner of your mind and come rushing back on days when you least expect them too.

In case you are wondering abt the title its an extension on the shorts i did earlier namely Meeting with a stranger and Love story (free publicity never hurts u see).