A... Part 4...

The unnamed story has a name now... it is called A... after the narrator whose name is A...

But that was a different day, in a different time, I did not have a note that day, a note which was not just a note but a death sentence, and each look at the note sent a shiver down my spine and I could feel life ebbing away with every reading of those cruel seven words.

“Find yourself and you will find me”, that’s what she wrote in the note. How was I supposed to find something which was not lost? How was I supposed to know if I was lost or not and if I did not know if I was lost, how was I supposed to find myself? What did it mean to find oneself, was I supposed to know myself better, was I supposed to find out what someone else thought of me to find myself, was I supposed to accost every acquaintance that I have with questions about myself, trying to get them to find myself for me. That is bound to be funny, trying to get others to find myself, when I am standing right in front of them. Or did she mean I was supposed to find my inner self, that inner self which she loved when she loved me, that part of my soul which was madly in love with her, which saw her as perfect, which made love to her with an voracious urgency as if the world was about to end the next day, that part of my soul which used to worship her. But when did I lose that part, I know that everything was not right these last few months, but I still loved her, I still loved her as truly as I ever did. So why did she resort to all this trickery, did she not see that my love for her had not waned, did she not feel the passion burning deep inside me like molten magma inside the bowels of the earth, did she not feel my insatiable hunger for her touch, her smell, her presence. When did I lose the ability to get through to her?

She once told me that I was the only person in the world who used to understand her and that was why she was in love with me. I remember asking her about what would happen when I stop understanding her. She did not say a thing, only rebuked me by asking me to never repeat such a thing. She said that with my words I was committing sacrilege against the God of love, against Kamadeva himself, and if decided to walk away with his bow made of sugarcane having a string of honeybees and his arrows adorned with five kinds of fragrant flowers, then there will be no love left in my life. I would be left with only sorrow, loneliness, a persistent intolerable pain in my heart from the want of love, a wretchedness which would consume me slowly like the winter fog slowly encircling and then devouring the lovely and lonely forest. I would be like the moon, which was forsaken by the stars and now stares down at us with its mournful melancholic face, thinking of long lost loves, of that one star that he used to love before Kamadeva decided to forsake him.

This chain of thoughts made me more desperate. But I did not know how to start about solving the riddle. She once told me that the key to solving any problem was information, any random information, it might not seem useful at first, but then the solution was always hidden inside all the information, we just had to look hard enough. So I decided to collect all the information about this puzzle, which meant I had to collect all known information about myself. I remembered that long ago I had written an essay about myself. It was a few weeks after my first story was published. My editor called me and told me that my stories had generated a lot of interest among his readers, and he wanted me to write a piece introducing myself to the readers. So I wrote an essay aptly titled “A Short Essay about Myself”. It was before I met her. I was a different person then. But at least it was a starting point for me in my quest to reclaim what has been lost.