Love, Life and Uncertainities

Life Goes On

A lot of days had passed, life was moving, relentlessly, uncaring, having no regard for if we could match its pace or we were too tired to follow. Semester after semester, continuous examination, in the exam hall and even outside of it. I was, nevertheless, running ruthlessly, giving no brains to my inner turmoil that demanded me to stop. Writing was my only outlet, my only savior. So I wrote, I wrote hard, I wrote everything out of my chest on the paper untill it was marked by my heart. I did it everyday; one letter after another. This had become a new routine for me now.
Everything was fine, apparently, but I knew that I was transported back to that memory enclosure in my head that I dreaded to reach, that knew no way out: unless someone breaks into it. No storm had come to world, no catastrophies, no tragedies most dreaded happened, no nightmares had become real to the people around; Sam and Liza would be happy in their dreamland together. I was nowehere, none of anyones anticipation or fear came to life. Everyone got what they wanted, everything went well the way it should have been. I had also come to believe it was good for everyone, including me; he was never the man for me or may be my feelings were really childish, they never could be reciprocated.

But I still had that child in me, somewhere, so much had happened, so much time had gone by but that naive child still looked accross years for that another child , holding whose hand it had come to know of first feelings of tenderness, that child had grown too soon, too far, changed into some unknown, far off being. That child, that I once was, still wish those storms that never came, should have come, God! they should have come and taken away everything with their wild waves into the occeans of uncontainable passion. May be that have been better than this numbing, ever constant ache that has occupied a room in the void of my heart. It doesn't leave, it stays, it feels like a drizzle of rain, that pours slow, never changes into a storm but doesn't go away.

There was no news of him for years now, no path lead me back to him, no crossovers, no road junctions in the near future, or far off, farther far away, in possibilities of fantacies. My world revolved in some other orbit and his world could never and would never come in contact with mine. Yet I couldn't help but imagine how he spent his days now, how he looked laughing with her, how his happiness felt, what he did in his days and nights, yet I couldn't just text him somedays "hey, how is life at your end?"

This facility was no longer available to me.

I wrote letters on paper, folded them, put them in the envolopes, all starting with "Dear Sam" and ending with "Yours Sarah". I posted them to him too, in my head, but just the address was different. It wasn't his.

It was Zain's.

This had been happening for months now. Actually it was Zain's suggestion that I post these letters to him instead of dumping them. So I did. But wasn't sure that he read all of them. He called it all some form of "catharsis".

Right now, I was sitting beside Zain in the park on our common spot, besides the lake.

"I have been reading these letters, actually all of them, right when I receive them, I start reading and I have kept them all stored". He spoke to me while dipping his feet in the lake.

I noticed he had carried them all here with him and together it looked like thick bundle of papers, "Oh God, don't tell me I have written all of these! " I almost squeaked.

"Okay, I won't", Zain shot back humorously.

"Zain I am serious and why have you carried all of these here ?", I eyed him suspiciously.

"To dump them in the lake", he replied keeping his face and tone straight.

"What! No! we can't do that". I shouted bewildered.

"And may I ask why not ?", Zain asked with a forceful voice.

I had no answer to this 'why' so I kept quite and just waved my feet in the lake, leaning back a little more on the tree.

"Okay, you are obviously not ready but I have to say this to you and you need to hear it", I was still looking down, avoiding his gaze so he uplifted my chin, "look at me Sarah, you need to understand what I am going to say now". I raised my head high and waited for what he had to say.

"Sarah, If someone reads those letters only and doesn't know you, him or anything besides it, he would be convinced that this "Sam" was totally in love with this girl who is writing these letters and this 'love' was so pure but bounded and compelled to stay apart somehow. These letters are beautiful, they paint 'Sam' as someone heroic. But I am not that person who read the letters alone. I know you and things that happened outside of it too. So trust me when I say it. This 'Sam' from your letters was nothing like the 'Sam' that I came to know when you told me the sequence of events that happened in your life." He wasn't finished yet, I knew.

I was looking at him like he was speaking some foreign language. I wasn't getting whatever he wanted to say. My brain wasn't keeping the pace or may be it was my heart that was causing conflict.

"But-t, I didn't lie in those letters. Those all things that I spoke of in the letters, did happen". I spoke in an unsure voice.

"Sure, they would have happened, but you are holding onto them to still believe it meant something to him as well, you know sometimes we see things in the way that we want to see and sometimes there is a great difference between what we remember and what really happened in the past", Zain explained.

"I am seriously not getting what you are saying, what do you want to say ? I have made it all up in my head?", I frowned with confusion.

"Okay, alright, lets do it this way", he shifted a little closer to get more relaxed and scratched his right eye brow, "Sarah, you know I had once read a book called Glass Menagerie, I read it a long time ago, but there were some sentences that are still engraved in my head, it said there is difference between memory and reality; memory exaggerates events of emotional importance while dimnishing the ones that lack it and so what we can remember after years is only some product of our emotions, may be that's what happened in your case, but may be there was some other truth to it"

He finished and waited for me to say something.

I was yet processing it all. It wasn't easy standing on the crossroads of heart and brain. After a while I found my fragile, whisper like voice coming, "may be you are right Sam, may be thats what happened but my heart doesn't get it still" I uplifted my eyelids at looked at Sam with beseeching eyes, "why it still doesn't get it Sam? what it is that it doesn't get ?"

"Sometimes we have to accept things that our heart doesn't understand and our brains can't make sense of, yet we have to realize that there would be some truths that we wont understand but that doesn't make them go away, we have to live with them, just let go of it Sarah"

I nodded and sighed.

But I knew deep down that I was far from letting go.

I still missed him, though I never thought, did he miss me ? because I knew he didn't, at least not the way I did. My story was plain one way road, there was no coming back and he was traveler gone far, fading away on the edges and I was the person on other end, seeing him fading away from my sight. This wasn't some fiction romance, some movie where the hero emerges back from the fog, or the heroine one day, discovers that the unfeeling, rude hero had same feelings inside or where people fight on the 'faces', go away, marry other people yet come back to each other, over years, in the end. We never confessed, never fought, never made up. It was all in my head. There was no "us" ever.

He was never coming back to me. Finally I had realised and accepted this much truth at least.

Though I yet had to realize that I really didn't mean anything to him ever. Of course, it had to take time; it isn't easy to accept how 'unimportant' you were to someone who was so important to you.

And I knew that the moment I do, would be the final stage of letting him go.