I get up from the table and walk towards the bathroom door. It is a Friday night and Disha and my dad are watching Lord of the Rings. My mother is studying, and grandmother watching TV in her room. No one notices me as I walk away. The door shuts. It is dark. I grip on the counter, my back facing the wall and look up. I do not want to cry. The sound of water leaking away can be heard, just like my spirit leaving me and going far far away.
I feel dull. I feel alone. I do not want to cry. The lights are still off, the darkness brings a smudge of peace. Just like the sound of traffic from the window, and the shadow of moving trees. It feels like someone ripped my throat out. I have no voice, only tears. I long for a hug, for a wrap-around-me, for a specific voice to tell me it will all be okay.
"You will find somebody else."
"He did not deserve you."
"You will get over this."
"Just feel what you are feeling."
These words do not help, yet there are no other words a person can whisper to me.
When does a relationship finally end?
- When I finally take out his photo from my wallet
- When I donate the books I had borrowed to the college library since he doesn't live here anymore
- The last time I check his profile picture on social media
- When my heart smiles instead of feeling squished when that song comes on
- How wearing olive green palazzos with a white t-shirt (that he loved) is not painful anymore
- When I do not want to punch him and kiss him at the same time anymore
- When the longing is gone
But the longing is still there, even ten months after I felt like ripping my throat out. He broke me down. As he walked away without letting me say goodbye, as he walked away without wiping my tears, as he told me everything I wanted to hear eventually when it finally was too late.
Was it too late? He did make me feel outrageously lovely about myself. Sometimes.
"I still want him." I tell Zeal. "After all this shit I have put myself through, when he is finally responding the way I want, I still want him. And it is so hard for me to tell him no, over, and over, and over again."
"Well you have to decide," she told me. We were sitting in her car, a block away from my house. And then she proceeded to tell me about a mini conundrum in her own love life. "Well you have to decide." I told her.
The difference between our decisions only consisted of the word "still".
Do you still want to spend extended moments laughing into kisses and waking up his sweaty self in the summer vs Do you want to spend the rest of your life with him?
Would you still open the refrigerator and hit yourself gently with bottle gourd just because he told you to vs Would you do absolutely anything for him without hesitation?
Does your entire being still feel unspeakable amounts when you are with him vs Do you think you might be able to feel love for him?
Her answer to all those questions, in the next few days we would find out, was a clear resounding no. My answer to all those questions, I knew in that very moment, was a resounding yes. I proceeded to block him. I could not do this.
For some people, letting go is scarier than staying, even if staying causes suffering, pain, or misalignment. What am I afraid of? I fear I will let people down. I fear disappointing them. And if my staying with him is going to be partially motivated by my fear of letting him down, I cannot do that either. I need to believe more fiercely in what I want. I need to know more strongly what I want. The reality is that over a period of time, I have realised that I had no backbone and no boundaries other than physical ones. In fact, boundaries are something I really have to work on.
"What are boundaries?" Zeal asks.
"Let me Google my favourite definition." And I take my phone, misty eyes behind how I have blocked him, and search. The lock button has come off, so I struggle a bit to switch it on, thrashing the broken button even more in my emotional frenzy.
"Mark Manson says Healthy Personal Boundaries = Taking responsibility for your own actions and emotions, while NOT taking responsibility for the actions or emotions of others." I recite. "I have terrible boundaries, and take way too much responsibility for the actions and emotions of others. Need to stop doing that before I get into any kind of relationship. It isn't fair to me, or to them." I continue telling her something I have told myself repeatedly in the past. Speaking it out loud to someone concretises it.
So I must take my time now. Working on being the person for myself, like the person that I would want as a partner in my life. I have decided that I will show up for myself, take responsibility for my actions, and own what I want unapologetically.
In my yet largely unexplored life, I have understood that if you keep your heart open, you will find people you love. You will love them dearly. You will feel intense gratitude, and then it will all come crashing down when that person leaves you, to very slowly creep into your life again. You will feel power, hate, anger, and passion so high, and want to control yet give up control at the same time. Love to me cannot be classified. It is not a singular emotion but pure emotion of any form - a delicious combination of all of them rather, along with a lot of acceptance and understanding.
But keep this in mind: if your relationship feels like a day at Jupiter, lighting up your world every ten hours, the end of your relationship will teleport you to Venus where the sun won't shine for another 243 - not hours, but days.
The guy you love isn't going to necessarily be there till the end. You are going to have your days at Venus, and you will have hopefully so many more at Jupiter, and on some normal days you will be on Earth. And then you will see the sun, and the trees. You will get off the station at twelve in the noon after changing three trains, and feel the cold wind gushing in your face as the sun blazes hot in the sky, and wonder whether this is what it feels like finally coming home. You will stand there, on the bridge of the station, and wait for two seconds, or more, on Earth.
Sometimes people just teleport into your life. Sometimes you fall in love with these aliens, and then they go away to their own planet. But cherish what you had. Smile through the pain when you can. Embrace how much you love him, or her. And keep loving him if you want to. No one can take away something you had, no one can take away the lessons learnt, no one can take away the good, or the bad, or the ravishingly beautiful. The mistake we make is assuming all relationships are going to last forever. What is forever? Again, it has a different meaning to different organisms. Spiders have an average life of twenty-one to twenty-three years. Your pet dog may die in ten. Forever is something unreal. It is only real in your heart, or in your mind.
So the guy you love isn't necessarily going to be there till the end. But darling, love him with everything you have, and know what you want, because if you aren't honest to yourself about everything, you'll regret it. Etch your own forever.
