You smile. Spread it around you. Illuminate a home with it. Almost like the fresh rays of the morning star as they enter through a window inside a lazy room and light it up in gold.  You laugh. Share a joke. The sight of laughing faces around tickles you. It gives you happiness – the one that stays somewhere in the corner of your heart and makes you happy whenever you revisit that corner. You just wish to see laughter all around you. All you want are curves of smiles, stolen giggles, bursts of laughters, cracking guffaws, happy chuckles. You don’t hesitate in actually laughing out loud in real life and see your friends rolling on the floor laughing. You laugh for the heck of it as you are happy. You smile because you mean it. You are being an angel.

You mock. Scathe someone before everyone. When bursts of laughter follow, you smile a wining smile. You chuckle, not wanting to share the wicked feeling. You are so happy at the moment. The sight of people around you laughing gives you an evil, ugly contentment. Is it really contentment? Or is it just a fleeting illusion of it? You don’t bother. You are just happy in the feeling of happiness that comes from the sorrow of your counterpart. His expressions, his helplessness, his misery – all contribute in your joy. You crack a dirty joke on him. You like the compliment showered on you on your sense of wit. You ask him to take it easy, act like a sport. After all it’s a joke, you assure yourself. You convince others that’s what it really is. You love this manipulation of smiles, barter of jokes, deals of laughter. All you want is that winsome product – a wicked happiness of your own. You are being a demon. Period.

You hurt just to test what it feels to be on the other side – on the side of affliction. You hurt because it’s the only way to know the other’s feelings. It’s the best way to assess his love, to know how much he feels. You maneuver with ease through the other’s mind – touching exactly the areas that you feel are the weakest. You navigate through his heart like Columbus in search of America. Milestones in the other’s heart excite you as they tell a tale of your little wins. You point your finger and show him what he lacks, what he doesn’t have, how much unworthy he is of your attention. Here’s where your own heart craves for your attention. It wishes to tell you how much love and attention you need too. For now, it’s more convenient to listen to the brain. You don’t want to disclose your weakness. You design words. Select them carefully and put them with much skill at the right places and at the right time. This is like a scramble game to you – you know you will win because you are good at spellings. When you don’t know the spellings, you will create one. You never lose your guard with fear of exposure. You just wish to control the other’s emotions. It gives you the same joy when you snatch away the remote control from a kid’s hand and tease him. Other’s tears make you realize your power. Other’s sorrow makes you ecstatic. You revel in that moment like the winning wrestler who fails to see that his much weaker opponent exhausted all his energy to give him a tough match. His sweat – droplets of humility. Your sweat – the drop of pride. Demon. Period.

You forgive. You always lose count of the number of ‘sorrys’ thrown at you, whether genuine or malafide. After all, you always tell yourself, love doesn’t keep a record of wrongs. You stretch your patience because you know how it feels to be guilty. You have been there once. You don’t want the other to be there ever. In fact, you want to save him. And so you forgive, again, regardless of the zillionth count or even the countless periods and moments of time. You forgive out of love, out of a deeper affection. You make the other feel better. You clean every bit of his guilt, you stoop down to sweep every inch of his dirtiness. You even attempt to delete the bitter memories of wrong from his heart. You forgive because you value. The other is not perfect and you know that you aren’t either. You wish to accept this every time you forgive. You don’t want the other to cry like you do when you wrong someone. You manage to catch his sense of aplomb the moment it’s about to fall down. You wish to preserve his self-respect. You assure and re-assure. You take so much of pain to pick his self-respect piece by piece and then work meticulously to put them all together. This gives you happiness. And when the other thanks you, you are taken aback laughing. You tell him that you needed to forgive him as much as he needed to be forgiven. You just forgive because you want to and for nobody else really. Angelic.

You act like a child, often, deliberately. You behave kidishly before the other only so that he feels a sense of maturity. You allow him access into your life. You want him to be a parent simply so he gets back on his feet again and reclaim his sense of authority, his spirit of power. You let him handle you simply out of love, out of respect. You let him speak on and on and nourish his ego, giving him an undivided attention of a child. You hide your maturity, pretend you don’t know just so the other gets a sense of his knowledge. In your heart, you caress him, you look him in the eye even if he fails to see a sea of love in them. Seraphic.

You are being a spoilt child, scheming, in his heart. You manipulate to suit your fancies. You make the other feel guilty of ignoring your moves. You lure, entice, charm with your kidish ways only to entrap. You take the ‘kid avatar’ only to bend, seduce, take pleasure. The kid in you learnt very early how to exploit, encash. So you are a master at playing a kid. You know how alluring this can be. You don’t pursue mutual pleasure here. You just want to be selfish. Satanic. Period.

Readers, introspection. Period.