Grass

The grass was soft, carpet-like almost. It was also mildly wet, but not unpleasantly so. The smell of grass in the morning was intoxicating to me, as if it smelled of bright and sunny days, of painted blue skies and bare strokes of white clouds. It smelled like sunshine and riverbanks. I love mornings like this, when I could just lie on the grass and let my worries stay in the classrooms, absorbed in this morning solace that comes only once a fortnight.

I hate the rain that came to spoil the sunshine. The trickling of menacing raindrops on the roofs, like nails being shaken and stirred in a metal jar, was always greeted with the unaccepting sigh of a soul expecting the rest of the day to be miserable and unsatisfying. But this day, at that moment in time, the sunshine greeted me with its glowing radiance, and I was half-expecting the day to be a great one. The other half expected it to be at least a good one.

I was thinking of her then. It would’ve been great if she was here, I said to myself. I looked to the empty patch of grass just beside me, and I tried hard to imagine her there, chatting with me, about anything and everything. Even about nothing. I would’ve gladly spent hours with her than do anything else. Even if we did nothing but lie on the grass and talk. I wouldn’t even need to face her. Just hearing her voice would’ve been enough. That’s not to say she didn’t have a face worth looking at. It was quite the contrary. She was beautiful, in every sense of the word. Beautiful on the outside, and also on the inside, or at least that’s how the cliché goes. And for her, that was true.

The grass had slightly dried after what was maybe three hours of idle thoughts, and no longer did it smell fresh. Instead it mildly smelled much like burnt leaves and branches. The heat from the sunshine had intensified, and my skin longed for moisture. I didn’t realise I had spent too much in the sun until I heard someone calling my name, and said something about if I wanted to go to lunch. I picked myself up, and left the grass field with a slightly remorseful aftertaste.