She lives on the edge, or  so they say. I know for a fact that she doesn't, she slips out through the corners and then slides back in, disappearing momentarily until she has something new to say. 

I met Marine at the age of sixteen. My country song filled world was being vignetted by early punk rock of the 2000s. I remember sitting on my windows XP, with that infamous Autumn Background as wallpaper, getting one or two CDs per year to listen to The Killers or The Cure. 

I had never been a rocker. I preferred the soft, melody of a familiar country song to the incoherent shouting of a rock one. But maybe it was because I had never experienced the emotions these rock songs were trying to convey. 

Maybe I had never experienced the helplessness, the anger and the hopeless that would make me believe that the only way out was having someone else speak your truth. That the only silence was in 2 mins and 30 seconds of this incoherent shouting. It might have seemed like shouting to me at the time because the language seemed almost foreign. 

I had never experienced being "Mr. Brightside" or "Human".

But that summer, my life was burdened with worries that had seemed to fade into the blue of the distance till then. With the loss of my grandmother and the prospect of higher education drawing closer and closer, I found myself feeling powerless and hopeless.  

So, I pressed play and I discovered the scary, exhilarating unknown of the Rock. 

A part of that scary, exhilarating unknown was Marine. 

She lived in the house next to mine. Though until sixteen years of my life, she had been an unknown bird faded in the background of a sky full of birds. 

That summer, suddenly she became the sole point of focus. 

I was listening to The Cure on a mp3 player I had borrowed from my elder brother, when she hopped the fence next door and sealed our fate. 

To say Marine was beautiful would be an understatement. She was the kind of beauty everyone wanted to possess. Not possess in the sense that they wanted it to be theirs, but to own like an object. Though luck didn't favour them because Marine was brave and unrelenting.  

Marine had a pale face tinted by the rosiness of youth. Her cheekbones were high, almost aristocratic. Her eyes were the blue of chlorine-filled swimming pools penetrated by diffused sunlight. Her hair were the blonde of sunrises, almost blinding in their beauty. Her body was petite and seemingly perfect, she seemed perfect even. But what seems is not what often is. 

"The music called me." She announced and sat down next to me on the fading green grass as if I had known her all my life. 

I looked at her, puzzled and she must have noticed because she said "I'm Marine". 

And my first thought was that she could be. She did seem like a mermaid fresh out of the sea, a siren in this unknown territory, a peacock with his wings outspread looking as if it was clad in the sea itself with a thousand shades of different colours. 

"I'm Valentine." I said, wishing for the hundredth time that my mom wasn't obsessed with the holiday and hadn't named me that. 

I expected Marine to question this or laugh at this but she did neither. She nodded as if she had accepted this undisputed truth and lay down in the grass. She closed her eyes and listened to the music. 

I am sure that the music was very familiar to her because it seemed like her head was dancing along with the beat. Her head bobbed back and forth at just the right moment and with her eyes closed, it looked like a strange form of meditation. Like she was disappearing into the ethereal depths of the sea of her origins. 

I was awestruck by her moments and entranced with this act of beauty. When the song ended, I didn't quite notice. It ended abruptly and too quickly, even though I had sung the song atleast a thousand times, it seemed new again. 

She opened her eyes and sat up, looking at me. That broke the trance and I fell not so gracefully back to reality. 

"I have tickets to a 'Killers' concert. But I have no one to go with. You free Saturday?" She asked. 

I was so taken aback by this sudden invitation that I barely nodded. She disappeared after a jump up the fence and I was left staring at the place she was sitting a moment ago. 

She seemed like a whirlwind, floating from one plain to another while I was barely exploring the one plain I was born in. 

************************************************************************

Saturday was both the day I dreaded and was excited about. Visiting Marine was often like that, it could go either way. 

When I saw Marine that night, I felt out of place. She was clad from head to toe in black. From her black leather jacket to black jeans to t-shirt. But she still managed to stand out in the abundance of black jackets somehow. 

Underneath the flickering neon lights and surrounded by the chaos of moving bodies, I felt out of place. I had never been a hardcore rocker. I was still a newbie in all matters rock. 

Then, I looked at Marine. With her eyes closed, she was swaying to the rhythm as if she had done this all her life. She seemed at home with the beat drops and tempo pickups. 

"This is my first time at a concert." I said directly into her ear so that she could hear in this jampacked circus. 

"Mine too." She replied with a smile. Then, she took my arms in hers and helped me dance along with her. I followed her lead and I am sure in that crowd of a thousand people, we were the only one doing a couple dance. 

Looking at Marine, I could tell that she didn't care that people were giving us weird looks. And just looking at her, made me not care as well. 

***********************************************************************
Throughout the years I have known Marine, I have heard many people call her many things. Her sister called her Mar, her friends called her Rey, her father called her Mary but only her mother had ever called her Marine. 

Her mother had been a lover of seas and distant horizons, wiith her future child she wanted to share that love. So, she gave her a name to match. Though Marine had not inherited the love of seas, she had inherited the love for the forever-distant distant. 

In our second meeting, our conversation turned towards nicknames. 

"What do people usually call you?" She asked. 

"Val" I replied. 

"I don't want to call you by the name other people call you. In the life of every person we know, we hold a different place. So the name should be different shouldn't it?" She said, nonchalantly. As if she hadn't said something mildly interesting and this was a universal truth. I nodded, not knowing what to say. 

"Let's see. Valentine. Tine. Val. Len. Len! Does anyone call you Len?" She asked. I shook my head. 

Her face was embraced swiftly by a grin. 

"Len, it is then." She said. 

"It would make sense for me to give you a nickname too. Hmm, Marine. Ma. Rein. My Rain?" I said, immediately in love with the nickname. 

She bowed slightly. "Your Rain, it is." she said, with smile.

 I could tell that she liked it. 

************************************************************************
Marine was a plunge into the unknown as mentioned before. You never know how deep you were going to end up when you jumped. But for some reason you jumped anyway, because for some reason you couldn't help but trust her judgement. 

So, when next Saturday My Rain took my hand and dragged me to her car, I was both doubtful and enthralled. 

She was a good driver, contrary to popular assumptions. She seemed to have the balance in driving that she usually lacked in life. 

"You are going to love this place." She assured me, filled to the brim with so much confidence that I couldn't help but believe her . 

So, she drove for half an hour to the background music of soft rock and background image of passing sycamore trees. The blue and green slowly dissolved into black and green. 

She hummed along with the songs in the silence and I couldn't help but want to listen more and more. Her voice was beautiful, shame she didn't sung much. Or maybe she did and I just didn't know yet. 

She talked about nothing and everything during that ride, things that both did matter and didn't. She talked of old cartoon shows, obscure names, forgotten places and songs. I noticed that she neither talked about herself not asked about me. It felt like she was comfortable being friends without really knowing each other. It felt like she wanted this terra incognita, this unknown land to exist between us, unexplored for the time being. 

And strangely enough, I was comfortable cruising through the expanse of that land, just like she was. Exploring only the corners without venturing deep within. It created this unfamiliar familiarity which was strangely comfortable. It was a refuge from social norms which required an introduction and familiarity, it was an act of pure rebellion.

It seemed like we were in this space which existed only outside the normal world. Through the years, Marine became a master at crafting these spaces for herself and sometimes for others. 

The car stopped slowly in the dark of the night. No streetlights were in sight to shed a light on this unfamiliar plain. Rain opened her car door and exited the car. I too, followed suit. 

The cold of the night embraced me almost immediately. I shivered, buttoning up my jacket. It was dark but it was filled with many shades of dark. 

The dark of the car, just a shadow against the dark of the sky seemed darker. The dark of the distant trees seemed darker still. The dark of Marine's shadow seemed the lightest. 

Soon, she was by my side with a flashlight in her hand. She took my hand with ease, as if it was the most natural gesture and we trudged along through the woods. 

The woods were really "lovely, dark and deep" here. The shadows of trees became clearer as we approached them, the far dissolving into the near and the near into the far. Marine was the constant near in all of this. 

The warmth of her hand against the cold was an assurance that this was going to turn out okay and I believed it. 

Soon, she stopped and I too stopped. 

"Look!" She said, pointing at the sky. At first, I didn't see what she was trying to show me. 

Then, I did. 

Little specks of ember floating beneath the silver streaks of light in the sky. Fireflies dancing in the night, shrouded by the starlight. 

"Wow." I whispered. 

Marine guided me to the forest floor. Though I was concerned about insects and other small animals, she seemed so self-assured that I threw my worry away. She was content to living in this moment, and not to worry about trivial things until she was face to face with them. She went headfirst into the unknown, not worrying about the dangers until she was obliged to worry about them. 

She lay down next to me. My legs was touching hers ,my arm was touching hers, my cheek was touching hers. We were as close as our bodies would allow us, sprwaled on the ground side by side. 

And when I turned to look at Marine, in the blue of her eyes I saw the gold and silver. And I wanted to take in more of that picture and not the one above me. But I turned back towards the sky, knowing that we would always share this memory. 

That's the thing with memories. We don't think they matter when we are in them, but they matter when we are not. They only matter when we can't revisit them. 

Somewhere in the night, my hand slipped into Marine's. Perhaps it was she who made the move or perhaps it was me, it was not clear and it didn't matter. What mattered is that none of us tried to let go of other's hand. 

************************************************************************

The first time Marine slipped through the edges was the very next year. 

Back then, our friendship had grown stronger. Through conversations with her or people she hanged around with, I came to know quite a few things about her. 

Marine loved music. She had been born with a love for music, playing Mozart at the age of 3. She had been quite the prodigy and through the years had discovered many styles and genres. 

She had switched from classical to blues to country to electric and finally to rock. She stayed with rock longer than the others. 

Perhaps it was because she was at that point in her life like me, when rock seemed to possess more meaning than any other sort of music or perhaps it was for other reasons. Marine was now a hard-core rocker, either way. 

We corresponded daily by the use of those obscure chatrooms in the early days of the internet and through face-to-face communication. She told me about the bands she liked and handed me albums to listen to and in turn I told her about the ones I liked and the books she could read. 

At the end of the week, we shared our thoughts with each other. I still think that the best way to know a person is to learn about the things that that person cares about. 

Thus, unofficially my Saturdays were reserved for My Rain. 

Until one Saturday that wasn't. 

I was waiting with excitement in my garden, where she usually picked me up. I waited for three hours but she didn't show up. 
I called her house and was told that she wasn't home. 

As human minds often think of the worst as soon as something doesn't go as planned, I followed the same ritual. I thought that maybe I had done something wrong and Marine would never speak to me again. That maybe, we were over. 

As you might have guessed, I loved My Rain back then and I do even now. It was impossible not to love Rain because she moulded herself into the human equivalent of the very things you love.  

Love hurts and is too quick to judge. At its core, it is insecure and helpless. Love happens at the rarest of times in the most unlikely of places and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it. Love brings with it futility and ignorant bliss and a line which divides the two. 

So, I was potentially about to go through the stages of grief when the doorbell rang. Out of habit, I opened it; expecting it to be my father back from work but it was not my father. 

It was Rain, drenched head to toe in actual rain. Throughout my grieving period, I had not realized that it was raining outside. 

"Sorry that I am late." She said but her eyes told a different story. Her pupils were dilated, her grin wider than usual and her body restless. She seemed to be exploding with excitement. 

I smiled and gestured for her to come inside. 

She sat on a chair and I didn't care get there was a wet trial of water behind her, an evidence of her visit. 

She seemed to be barely able to sit. Her body was shaking with excitement, I was curious to know what had this effect on her. 

"I am now part of a band!" She announced suddenly. Her face turned into a smile that told me that I was the first person she had told those words. Her face told me that she had been waiting to say those words for so long that she had ran in the rain all the way to my house, just to tell me. 

She squealed a girlish squeal of delight. An expression of glee I would never hear from her again. 

Her excitement was infective. In minutes, I was up on my feet and jumping along with her. I hugged her wet body, barely noticing my own clothes getting drenched in water as well. 

We must have celebrated till midnight. She had informed her parents that she would be staying with me and we danced and laughed and sang. 

Then, she drifted off into peaceful, tired sleep on my bed. I slept next to her, not as tired but equally peaceful. 

Sometimes the way her face looked like that night, flashes in front of my eyes. Her eyes are closed, the enchanting gaze hidden behind a veil. Her face is encased in a smile. A smile which isn't suggestive but pure and innocent. She seemed like a child at content with herself and everything in her world. She seemed like she would stay like that forever, never worrying about the unknown or the edges. She seemed like she was content being in the middle of it all. 

************************************************************************
The first act of slipping, brought with it many more. Saturdays were the days for her band rehearsal. The band was called "Silent Sirens". She was the new lead and trust me, she was quite the siren. 

Rocking along to the beats of rock, I attended a few of her rehearsals. If not everyone of them. 

When she sung, her eyes were closed as if she was lost in another realm and her voice affirmed this truth. It was ethreal with the power to carry you to another realm as well. It was almost hypnotic and reassuring at the same time. 

Gradually though, she hung out with her bandmates after rehearsals as well. They were all older than her. They were in college while she was still in high school. But in confidence, she surpassed them all. She seemed more mentally secure than all of them put together. 

Our Saturday evenings turned into Sunday Evenings. She talked about the band, the music, the new songs she was writing, how they were going to be her big break. And I talked about how good she sounded, how she would indeed make it. 

I seldom talked about me during that period because it seemed to me that My Rain was entering a new realm and because everything in that realm seemed so exciting, she wouldn't want to be bothered with my mundane musings. 

That year, the most personal moments we shared was when she was writing her songs. She and I would go to the park or the forest or the river. 

Then, she would sit and scribble in her notebook with my head in her lap. She would mutter the words and hum the tunes and I would listen to them, entranced by them. 

Later, she would show the song to me and ask me to sing it other with her. Most of the songs were melancholic. But not the usual hopeless melancholy. A melancholy that made you imagine colours and the taste of sadness itself, the pain was palpable. I wondered where the source of this pain was but I never asked her. 

One song goes: 

Tint of the sky above, 
Your tinted face below. 
Your breath seems like a distant wind, 
Blowing on my face. 

You are a few centimeters away, 
But you are a dot on the horizon; a bird led astray. 
I could trace the edges of your face, 
But in my head blurred lines are all I trace. 

Have you gone to Away? 
Disappeared all of a sudden. 
Or am I the one Away? 
Am I the one who is distant?

Your eyes seem like a distant black hole,
That I could make my home. 
The taste of you seems like a memory from another life, 
When really it is this; in this time. 

Have you gone to Away? 
Disappeared all of a sudden. 
Or am I the one Away? 
Am I the one who is distant?

An empty house with no one present, 
A dim light burning incandescent. 
Do you see it or do I? 
There is no one here, nor you nor I. 

Those days it really wasn't clear who was the one gone to this Away. Physically it might have been her but perhaps it was me as well. Perhaps, the fact that I didn't try to bring her away from the Away played a part in sending her deeper into it. 

**************************************************************

Three years passed. My Rain fell deeper into that away but she also returned to me. 

She seemed to have lost the excitement she had felt upon entering that Away and was falling back into her usual life. Our Saturdays were ours again, the band practiced less and less. 

She tasted about herself and about me. I talked about her and about me. We drove to known places to see what we would find. She shared her dreams with me and I shared mine with her. Life, at long last; seemed perfect. 

Until she slipped again. 

Her band members had caught a whiff of drugs and alcohol. At the age of nineteen, Marine was curious just like me. Though I was not brave enough to try it, she definitely was. 

In the summer of 2003, Marine took cocaine for the first time. 

I know nothing as to what happened next, how she felt or how she reacted to it but all I know is that she came back home to me in a state of unexplained frenzy. 

Her hair was messy, her face pale, her eyes too wide and her smile was lost. She seemed both excited and dizzy at the same time. After a quick examination of her, I was sure she had taken something. 

So, I took her in and laid her on my bed and scoured the internet for things to do in this situation. I found many remedies and applied the ones I thought was safe. The best thing was to wait until she was back from this sudden high. 

She fell asleep again. I waited for her to wake up. 

When she did wake up, she seemed more tired. Her face seemed paler and her voice strained.

"That was awful." She remarked and I understood. Slowly, I helped her drinks water and eat and pull herself back together. 

At that moment, I imagined that she would never take drugs again but seemingly I was wrong. 

That summer, Rain slipped into the world of narcotics many times. Something called to her again and again. 

Though, she slipped these times without telling me. She must have known that I would have stopped her. 

I only got to know when Grace, her bandmate called me; worried that Rain might be addicted. 

It was a world-haulting shock for me. I would have never imagined Rain would do something like this behind my back so I was angry. I was angry and then suddenly I was devastated. I now lived with the knowledge that Rain had preferred hiding this from me than talking it out, it made me feel alienated from her. 

That night, I called her to my house. 

"Rain." I said, as she sat with her head on my lap. 

"Hmm?" She asked, her face filled with ignorant bliss. 

"Have you been taking drugs behind my back?" I said, without any hidden undertone to this sentence. She sat straight up in shock. 

Then, she surveyed my face as if studying it. She must have noticed the signs of worry and sadness. She pulled me into a hug and then suddenly her body was shaking against mine.

I only realized when I heard her sobs, that she was crying. I had never seen her cry before. Suddenly, she didn't seem ethereal, she felt human. 

"I am sorry." She sobbed, her tears drenching my shirt. 

"Shhh. It's okay." I mumbled, holding her tightly. "Everything will be okay."

"It's been hard." She admitted.

That in my opinion was the bravest thing she ever did. She was known to face difficulties head on. Admitting that it was hard, was the bravest thing she ever did.

"It will get better. Easier." I said. 

And she nodded in our embrace, I know she believed me.

Then, she retraced her arms and placed them around my neck. Suddenly her lips were on mine. She tasted like tears, mint and lollipops. I kissed her back, like I had been doing this all my life. 

"I love you, Len. I promise not to do drugs,again ", she whispered against my lips.

"I love you too, My Rain." I whispered back. 

The night dissolved into kissing and eventually sleeping in each other's arms.

***********************************************************************

I have always dreaded story endings. But no matter what, every story has an end. 

The very next day, my world shattered. The police were the one who said it. 

Marine was dead. My Rain was dead. 

She had overdosed the next day. 

No, she had not broken her promise. 

A man had drugged her forcefully and not kept in mind the amount of drug he used. She was dead. He was in jail. She was dead. 

She was dead. a statement which one said never quite gets reversed. It becomes a fundamental truth, something you wish you could change but you can't. 

It didn't hit home at first. It seemed to me that My Rain would just come back any moment and laugh and tell me that it was all a joke. That she couldn't believe that I believed it. 

But her body in the white coffin which incased it, told a different story.  

She looked beautiful still and peaceful even. The stableness she had been denied all her life was given to her without a single complaint in death, if I knew Marine well enough I knew that she wouldn't have liked death. She didn't want that stableness, but she wanted it to be a home she could always get back to. Just like she had always got back to me. I wished she could get back to me again. 

I held her hand again, even though now it felt cold and foreign. It had ceased to belong to her. It belonged to who she once was. 

Thst day I learnt many things about Marine. Her mother told me that Marine had been depressed for most of her life. That she had ventured into the unknown as a coping mechanism. So, it seemed the drugs called to her because that unknown became a home of sorts. A refuge from the cruel world. 

She told me that Marine was looking for an apartment in Santa Monica for both of us. That after we graduated, Marine had planned to ask me to move in with her. Marinee had known Ioved Santa Monica. 

Her mother handed me the diary of songs that she wrote. 

"Most of them are about you. The love ones at least. She told me herself how in love she was with you and how scared she was that maybe you weren't. The night she confessed, she was jumping up and down. You should have this" she said, giving me the haunted words of the love of my life. 

That day I wept. That day begins with weeping and ends with weeping. 

It also came with the realisation that I had distilled Marine into Rain. Distilled her till everything human vaporized. Or perhaps she had just been Rain in front of me because she didn't want me to realize that the Marine was not without the darkest and deepest depth of the oceans. That there were places inside her where light couldn't penetrate and there was this foreboding no man's land which remained foreign to everyone expect herself. 

She was human. She was sad. She was depressed. She was worried. She was human. 

She was just a great actor. She was happy because it made me happy. She wasn't sad in front of me because it would make me sad. She was human. 

She really was my rain. The rain I waited for everyday to come so I could play in it and feel one with the water. The rain when gone plunged me into a desert of loneliness and thirst. 

Grief has a way of shutting down doors. Grief has a way of making you feel like you are alone in this one truly horrifying thing that could never happen to anyone else. That is far from the truth. But Grief does work best when it separates us from the rest. 

The memories I shared with Marine were different from the ones her mother shared with her. I shared the memory of the fireflies, sleeping by her side, kissing her, listening to her singfor and with me, long car rides with her and sometimes just observing the universe with her. 

But I had never watched her take her first steps, play her first song, say her first words. The Rain I knew and the Marine her mother knew were different because we were different and her relationship with us was different. 

Grief makes you realize that. But it hides the fact that in the end we all did know a form of Marine. That we are not alone in losing her. 

After an year of therapy, I mustered the strength to open the book of songs. 

I found her immaculate, cursive handwriting in there and many songs and poems. But this one struck out to me:

Her Rain 

I am the Marine that is spread across her skies, 
The Rain that fills in her rivers and seas. 
She is the sunlight that meets my rain, 
Turning into a brilliant rainbow; keeping me from turning into a hurricane. 

Days with her are endless and also end quickly, 
Her voice is the sweetest of all melodies.
With her I want to keep smiing just to see her smile, 
Because her smile is one of a kind. 

My Len, 
My Lens. 
In this rainbow-tinted landscape, 
In this journey from beginning to the end. 

Songs can't capture her essence because words fail, 
To capture how much she means. 
Her laugh echoes in the darkest times of my life, 
And I find the strength to hold on for a while. 

I might be wetting the pavements of her land, 
Might be eroding the rocks that stand. 
But for some reason she stays still.  
She stays through it all. 

Perhaps I fill in her deserts, 
Up Rise the oceans. 
We sink further together, 
In this love if not forever. 

I might be a hurricane shaking her windows, 
But she knows how to make me come back indoors. 
The reason I keep returning back, 
To that home in the ocean of mine. 

She has the ocean from which I vapourised, 
The home in which I did reside. 
I would have floated off with a other breeze, 
Had it not been for her rosy cheeks. 

So, I stay and when we go, 
You will take me with you. 
We will join hands in the dance of universe, 
Living in this moment.