Love Will Turn Back The Hands of Time...

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.  

5 year old kids. 

Hands filled with dirt. Nails caked with soil. Clothes with patches of mud. 
Scraped knees. 
The pockets of his shorts weighed down by marbles. 
A tiny edge of her lemon yellow frock balled up in her fists to hide that portion of it that was tattered while climbing the rocks by the sea. 
Mouths - a constant chatter. Eyes - a mirror, a virtuous doorway to two innocent souls. Words spoken - building castles in the air, puerile, careless, painting a comic book world of red and blue. 
Their naive tones dripping with the kind of carefreeness that those not belonging to their magical realm of age crave. 
Not wanting to go further. 
Not wanting to grow up. 
Wedged in this nook of imagined timelessness. 
The purest kind of love in this uncorrupted impasse. 

5 year olds no more. 

Limbs all perfectly fine. 

Clothes tailored to follow the immaculate code of banality. No speck of dirt visible. 

But there's darkness in the heart. 

No scraped knees. But bruised egos. 

Lips zipped up shut tight. Lest they say what they really feel like saying. 

Their eyes a pair of glassy lances - regarding each other with cluelessness interspersed with contempt. 

The innocence disappeared like a myth. 

All that leaves the lips are stone cold terse sentences. 

No child like narrative alive with mirth. 

Facts. 

Assertions. 

Declarations. 

Fallen into that inevitable abyss where all adults reluctantly retire. 

All grown up and yet thirsting for those carefree bokeh draped Sundays. 

Sanctity no more. 

Love... 

Love?

She broods over the same thing he does. 

How did we get here? 

What if we could go back? Get a second chance? Rewrite what has already been written? Undo all that wasn't meant to be said? Erase the gunk of all the years? A do over?

Can we go back to how we were?

Wishful thinking.