Someone told me the music went on even after the fall of the very last curtain, the end of the very last act. The young violinist played away, hidden behind the ancient curtains and the many Corinthian columns. His soft brown eyes noticed nothing. The storms outside were of little importance to him. He played and played and played and took no notice of me, of the words that flew past him and into my heart, of the flowers that remained on the abandoned stage, untouched, unnoticed.

I could not ask him to come away—the storm was raging on. I wondered what he was waiting for. It had been years since the curtain fell, years since I hugged him goodbye, years since I was told how he waltzed and waltzed to the tune of nothingness before losing himself in the middle of oblivion.

I had been asked to not try interrupting him—the music couldn't stop, it needed to go on. They said he remembered nothing of the years we had spent with him. He paid no heed to the memories that now reside elsewhere, far, far away from his heart.

Fourteen years ago, on the fourteenth of July, we had watched a flight of pigeons as a hazel-eyed artist painted us on the rooftop of a homely art gallery by Dhanmondi Lake. I would aimlessly walk the streets of Dhanmondi exactly three years later, looking for a melody long gone, a trace of the moonlight that had once engulfed bamboo mats and freshly brewed tea, the pigeons, the gallery…

Perhaps I was stupid enough to expect a sequel.