Stalker Diaries – Unfinished stories in the era of Facebook

The dazzle of their beautiful lives bewildered him. He spent countless hours looking at their picture perfect life. He watched all of them equally but somehow she overshadowed all the others. He would be engrossed in peeping into someone else’s lives when suddenly she would make her presence felt and he would leave all his active pursuits to follow her. Looking at that face of hers, with the perfect smile of hers. She had a load of friends, roaming around with them and discussing all the fun they had. Sometimes he wondered if she did really have all that fun or if it was all a charade designed to make him miserable. Then what if she’s as lonely and miserable as I am. Why does she keep boasting her friends all the time, she could break the world of glass she had created for her to live in a house of bricks with him. Thoughts troubled him and he thought about it a lot.

It was not all that bad. Sometimes he understood that he was trapped in a cycle of unending misery that he had inflicted upon him. He could do anything in this world. Anything that would give him happiness and satisfaction but somehow all he could manage to do was to peep. Peep into others’ lives to find what he thought was missing in his. He would fantasize being in their place, living their lives, unknown to him however was that she too was into him. Behind all the picture perfect life and the friends buzzing in her life she was in fact as lonely as he was if not more.

Foolishly enough she too thought that maybe it was only her. For whenever she opened her windows his soulful voice would pour in. He must be reading the new play he is writing. ‘What a talented person, what a useful life that is?’ She often wondered if he would accept her given that his life was much more than hers. She had her ring of friend to keep her company. She used them like a shot of heroin, one at a time with each day ending in a promise to start the next day on a better note. But every day she failed. There was nothing in her life to inspire her. She felt useless for there was no purpose to her life. The pain generated of this realization needed a powerful sedative, she dialed her friends and another day out was planned. She hoped he would finish his play by tonight, for she loved him dancing in his success and trying in vain to get the world take a notice of feelings. Nobody notices him doing that, they had their own rosy pictures to paint and a world to decorate. But she had none. With her day ending she would climb up to her bed and keep staring at the light emancipating from his world.

They lived just across the street but somehow the road dividing them had turned into a chasm. They both wanted to build a bridge and crossover, have a better look into the other’s life and ask for one final time, ‘Is this really worth this?’. But they never got the courage to cross the narrow black tar strip of a road. It forever defined their worlds. They moved in with new people but still stayed within an earshot of each other, occasionally looking onto the others’ window, noting their joys and sorrows, congratulating and consoling each other within the confines of what the society might have found acceptable.

His light has not shone for last few days. She kept waiting for the infrequent but mildly regular update of his life but none came. She was well acquainted with his habits by now to understand that everything was not its usual. She looked around into other people who knew him. She did not dare venture on her own. She got the hints that he had left and that’s the day she crossed the road to enter his world. She picked up her phone and dialed the number she had all this time, a bitter lady, maybe his ex she thought (she never liked her anyway), picked the phone. She expressed her sympathies and tried getting off the line quickly but not before the question was asked, “How did you know him?”

She replied in a manner so cold, it might have frozen the air carrying her voice, “Oh, we were just Facebook friends.”

That night she cried like she never did. All her charades that she had built around her seemed to fall apart. What do you defend yourself from when your biggest adversary has left you in the battlefield? He had left, leaving the arena for her to keep up her play, but now that he was gone she was devoid of her audience. There was no need for her now to keep up the tall walls of made-up happiness. The walls had done their job, they kept him out and she had out smarted him. Her pride won her the battle of dominance. The faint hearted gave up the fight and moved on nonetheless reluctantly. The pretend life of hers had overstepped into her reality and now that she was all alone she realized that she had been successful in preventing him from talking her heart away, unknown to her that she had lost it the day they had met and the game had begun.