Cheaters ✓

'Jungkook and I'

23 November-21 December 2020

After the last decision of ours, I felt like someone who had seen a sunrise after years of living in darkness. The darkness wasn't because of the lows of our love life. It ws because there were no highs any more. Monotony flattens the relationship curve. It makes everything you once found beautiful seem repetitive, and because you have the same experiences over and over again, they no longer remain potent enough to arrest your attention. The mind begins to wander. The heart begins to seek. What? Nobody knows, till a sunrise comes into view. Yoongi was that sunrise for me. He made me look forward to my tomorrows and taught me how to live my todays better. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't meet Yoongi before. Perhaps Yoongi and I were meant to meet at this juncture. Perhaps we had to be prepared for each other. Perhaps... when one tries to find reasons for something which has already happened, the list can go on and on. How does it matter why it happened? The more pertinent question is whether I'm happy that it happened. I am. Whether I'm going to treasure it. I will. The rest is inconsequential.

The question before us was simple: How would we prepare our respective partners so they wouldn't have mental breakdown once we disappeared from their lives! We did talk a lot about it on the phone and whenever we met in the last one month. Yoongi started teaching his husband (whose name I never asked and he never told me) basic domestic chores like cooking, how to operate the washing machine, the dishwasher, etc., but I didn't have to teach Jungkook anything. He anyway wasn't living with me. It was then that Yoongi and I realized that we didn't have to teach them how to manage a household, but convince them that they were self-dependent, that there was a world beyond us for them as well. Yoongi urged his husband to go on a trip with his friends, and began asking him if he found any girl or guy attractive and what not. I also did the same with Jungkook. In fact, he ended up going for dinner with a friend's friend who had been asking him out for some time. He told me he was in two minds because he was not sure if I would like it or nor. When he came back from the dinner and narrated what all had happened over the phone, I realized how our partners were bound by our insecurities. How we had become each other's prisoners, whereas one should be able to feel totally free in a relationship. To choose. To be. My eyes turned moist when Jungkook asked me if it was wrong to be attracted physically to someone when your soul belonged to someone else. I could only tell him that anything we couldn't justify to ourselves was wrong. Everything else was right.

Every time Yoongi and I met, during the last month, to discuss the progression of emotional self-dependency in our respective partners, I felt I could sense a tiny bit of Jungkook in him. I know it's weird. I'll tell you how it started.

We'd met in the first week of December for an hour. Yoongi had asked me not to have lunch. It was obvious, since we were meeting for lunch. But when we met, he surprised me by telling me he had got lunch for us. This was the first time he cooked for me. Nothing fancy. Simple Kimchi and fried rice. When I tasted the food, I thought of Jungkook. It tasted exactly how he would make it. And I had thought nobody could match Jungkook's skills when it came to simple, soulful food.

It gave me immense satisfaction to know that there were some bits of Jungkook in Yoongi. That I wasn't seeking a totally different person altogether. I was seeking a different value in the same kind of person. I could use that realization to justify the disappearance from Jungkook's life. I realized how much I needed it to feel good about myself. I didn't tell Yoongi about this realization, though. When he asked me how the food was, I don't know why I hugged him and cried. It was catharsis. I hadn't cried like that for a long, long time. Maybe It was my way of letting Jungkook go, even though I knew I should continue to look for him in Yoongi. I hadn't severed such an intrinsic part of my existence before.
'Jungkook and I' were history from there on. Everything we had shared-highs, lows, happiness, sadness, suffering, failures, successes, smiles, tears----would all be bundled into one moment and framed on the wall of time in the name of memory.

《♡》