Page 15 of The Guru: Shadow

“What happened to you?” he asked.

W-what happened to me?

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder what happened to you, why you feel so low of yourself?” His question hit her straight in the chest.

For a moment, it even rendered her speechless.

So heknew.

Am I really that easy to read? Damn. I need to mask it better.

“I don’t.”

“And I don’t like being lied to.”

It touched her somewhere so deep, because she hated it too, and now she was the one lying.

“Why do you even care?” she snapped at him.

“I find people interesting who don’t follow what’s socially dictated and just express themselves as they are. I don’t enjoy meeting the masks people put on, but meeting their souls.”

His answer seemed to be so honest. It made her feel seen for the first time. She couldn’t have phrased it any better, as it was exactly what she always felt like.

And maybe this small emotional connection made words pour out of her mouth without thinking. Or maybe it was her inability to shut the fuck up.

“What happened to me, are my parents, what they did as much as what they didn’t do. And if you like people who express themselves as they are, I am not your girl. I have no clue who I am, nor how to express myself.”

It was true. She was a nobody.

“But sure, no buttercup daisy,” she added with a little smirk, as for whatever reason her mind pulled up the image of Julie in her yellow dress. If she knew one thing, it was that she’d never be like Julie.

The laugh leaving his throat went straight down her spine in its beautiful rawness, meandering its way to her inner existence like a river splitting land.

“No, sure no buttercup daisy,” he sniggered. “They don’t get you. Your darkness. You, being different. But that doesn’t mean you don’t know who you are.”

She broke her gaze outside and flashed it towards him.

How does he know? How can he possibly know?

And when she didn’t answer, he whispered to her, “Maybe they are the ones who don’t know who they are. And if you ask me, I’d say the best way to know who you are is knowing who you are not.”

His words hit her like a bat to a ball.

And for the briefest of moments, for this one blissful fraction of a second, her self-loathing, her inner voice always criticizing herself, vanished. In this moment, with the stranger in his showing-it-off-in-your-face-car she had such a dislike for, she felt as if she could just be who she was.

She wasn’t faulty, wrong, or did not belong. Right here, right now, the weight of the Empire State Building she always carried on her shoulders was gone, as he quietened the waves of her mind into a still sea. A sea on which shore she stood, for the first time breathing in the clear air of a beautiful morning with the rising sun after years of storms.

“To recognize darkness, one needs to know darkness,” he said it so casually while for her, it contained the depth and wisdom of the entire universe in it.

He knows darkness. Well, he probably is the darkness himself.

Staring at him, a part of her screamed at her to run. Only it was too late. Because somewhere, deep in her existence, a longing had erupted like a volcano, and the lava of need burned down her insides. She did not know what his darkness was, and right now she did not care, because to her, he was the fresh air filling her lungs. She could sense, deep down in her deepest core, that their connection would eat her like a roaring fire consuming every last bit with its flames – leaving behind a trail of destruction.

But hell, what do I care.

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