Can I kiss you?

So the question hangs in the air, like a thick pall of smoke, precisely because I can’t go beyond this analogy. Couldn’t go past it, as it is there, blocking the free flow of imagination like a chastity lock in my mind. If something is hanging in the air for me, it has to be like a thick pall of smoke, and can never be compared to a helicopter in mid-air, or a humming bird humming away with its wings in a crazy static nonflight. Or a bee hovering over poppy seeds, trying to make up its mind about a midday high. I say “it” because I am told that the worker bees are sexless. What an existence, I wonder. Not to even know the pleasures of sex!! Who decided this, can you tell me? Call it god, or mother nature, I say it is bloody unfair.

The question is about “putting” a question, like the burghers in Sri Lanka would put it. I quite like that word “putting”. Loaded, if you ask me. And instead of digressing into one long list of things that the word “put” can mean, let me come to the question that I am putting here. The question, which hangs in the air is whether I would put the question, rather like putting a ball in your court. (I always felt that “putting the ball” in someone’s court is like nonchalantly going across the net and putting the ball on the other court. Something mischievous, something Radioheadish about the whole affair, about the cool, uncaring manner in which one just walks into another court and places the ball on the grass, while the rest of the world is kept wondering about this seemingly mindless exercise. Much like being puzzled about the exact genre of music Thom Yorke is trying to give birth to.)

Sitting across the breadth of your living room, facing you, in the midst of an inane conversation, whether I would put the question. Casually. That is the question levitating in mid-air, in stark contrast with the apple that inevitably falls. But Newton was Newton, and I being me, can’t with any amount of will power, make the question hang there.

Maybe I will. Maybe I will ask you whether you would allow me to gently plant a kiss on your lips. Maybe you will expect me to put the question, while I would keep procrastinating. Maybe you would kiss me before I could even think of asking the question. Maybe the thought would not cross our minds at all . . .

Maybe is the half-answer that we have to make do with till we give rise to a circumstance where you and I will be sitting across the breadth of your living room.

Because, across the length would be too far.