The Summer of Absolutely Nothing

4.

I laugh when people call me a romantic. ‘People’, significantly being my best friend and my boyfriend.

My best friend can be forgiven for calling me romantic, she met me in my afore-mentioned mooney phase in eighth.

The latter ought to know better. Thin, white, with frameless spectacles, he was the very image of an intellectual (if I were to be nice) or a nerd (but I’m not). Pedantic, self-important, unemotional, and a classic workaholic, a fact he took pride in. Mockingly, he laughed at his literary-arts-engineering girlfriend for her little flights of fancy.

Shot dead out of the sky.

The thin black jagged scars on my left wrist are testimony to the violence in me; uncontrollable, directed towards myself, for most part, but to him too, sometimes - I scare us. To the cold disinterest and quiet rage he bore towards me in our worst moments; which terrified me to said violence. On the best of days, under the sunshine, between hugs and laughter, our fights left behind under the cover of night, loneliness and forest, we could almost pretend to be a loving, doting couple - a shy boy and an over-attached, merry girl who had been together over two years. Almost, save the scars which showed clear in the white light, every time he held my hand.

Just because I was sentimental in our happier, warm love and he wasn’t; that does not define a romantic. The bitter darkness swirling vitriolically underneath the shiny surface has come to define me so much more.

I remember the last time I saw him. Fretting about his exam results, working out all he had to do. Self absorbed, irritated, impatient to get back to his room, books and batchmates with their stupid inside jokes. His safe boring little world of manly jokes about how puff sleeves don’t need a name, binge-watching serials with superheroes and hot women, the irritating cheap songs he sang every time he tuned me out, to the easy camaradie which he rubbed in my face every time I brought up my ‘girl problems’ of bitchy intrigue which he claimed not to understand.

I always itched to slap him when he made that face - the ‘duh-what’ face that men would typically make when confronted by the complicated species called women. He was not so much a man as the sit-com caricature of one - an out-dated, one-dimensional sit-com one no longer aired because of sexism. The working man. Another role he played up to very well - perpetually dealing with the clingy wife who wanted affection and companionship, and had no concept of work other than housework (a.k.a. me, an engineering student).

Things weren’t always like this. I think that he did love me, once.

He sat there, not looking at me, not near me, for five silent minutes, before abruptly getting up and leaving. I said nothing, to any of it. Tears slid out of my eyes, quietly and unassumingly, as the full weight of what I had lost hit me. It then fell away dully, like dead leaves of a tree.

I, once and for all, deleted all his contact details, his emails and messages. Blocked him on Facebook. Stupid, symbolic things to do, because he isn’t going to notice, is he? He didn’t notice when I disappeared.

I threw up twice after that. There goes my lunch.