Mysterious Readers

I saw her first time on a metro

Wearing her dark rimmed oval glasses

Reading the same novel I was reading

“Mysterious Readers”

We couldn’t hide our smiles

The mystery of story reading

Brought two forbidden readers together

Mysteriously

The golden cover of the book

Brightened her brown eyes

Like the sky at sunset

I felt the dusk coming over me

Our bookmarks were positioned

Precisely around the same part of the story

Possibly we were both at the same line

“They managed to send each other

Mysterious letters coded in language

Other than love.

But that wasn’t the language of hate.”

Meanwhile I fantasized our conversation

Supposedly if it happened

But it didn’t happen

Readers are almost always bad at talking

At least to other human beings

For a long time

We both pretended to be absorbed in our books

And surprisingly after few minutes

Our smiles mysteriously synchronized

To whatever we were reading

It was a mysterious exchange of sort

A coded language other than love

But similar to love only

I met her last time in a bookshop last week

Smelling the pages of a new novel

I had come to buy

Later that evening at home

While I was getting absorbed

By the suspense of the slowly unfolding story

I had this strange feeling

She must be reading the same line right now

“Lovers don’t meet randomly.

They meet precisely at the time of death.

The death of their past life.”