“She’s very lucky”, he said, as we made our way to the train station. It was starting to get dark and we were tired and hungry. The restaurant we’d wanted to tick off our list was heavily crowded and we were in no mood to wait for a table. We munched on some street food, a quick and easy solution to hunger pangs at six-thirty in the evening, and decided to call it a night.
“Who’s lucky?”, I asked, confused.
“She. The girl you’ve been talking about. I can tell that you love her, the kind of love that’s rare to come by these days. And this argument that you two are caught up in right now, I can see how it’s bothering you maybe more than it should. You care.”
I didn’t know what to say. She was lucky because I loved her? At least that is what my friend and favorite colleague had to say when I asked him what he’d meant by she’s very lucky.
“And you are a writer, amongst other things. Well, an amateur but a writer nonetheless. Mik Everett once said, if a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. I am sure you write about her, don’t you?”
My friend was quoting Mik Everett to me and telling me that the woman I was in love with was lucky because I was the one who loved her. Wow! That’s not something you get to hear about yourself every day.
“Umm…thank you? No one’s ever said that to me before. That’s a very sweet thing to say to someone Arthur. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, but it’s the truth. I would want someone to love me like that, the way you love her. I think it’s sweet and old school and wonderful. I know love is no fairy tale, but I also know it can become one if the right people are involved in the writing. I think you two would be great together. I really do.”
October is about trees revealing colours they’ve hidden all year. People have an October as well.
JM Storm
Between the two of us, I wonder who shed her leaves first.
Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m extremely happy or extremely sad. It happens a lot when I think of you.
Antonia Michaeli
I was drowned in equal parts love and equal parts pain when I was with you. The good days made my heart swell and the bad ones made me question everything about us. But some things never changed. Like the sense of relief that would wash over me the second I’d see your face, even on days when we’d fought and turned to radio silence. Like my want to touch you if I was in the same room as you, even on days when you’d made me so mad that I didn’t want to look at your face. Like the tectonic shift I could feel inside of me the second you’d be in my vicinity. Or like how I knew I was ready to take a bullet for you if I had to. ““If I never love anyone again the way I have loved you”, he said, “it will be a relief.”” Maybe I am being naïve or maybe I am being too full of myself but I guess I get what Mia Hollow was talking about.
Netflix very recently added a film to my list which it assumed I hadn’t already seen and one which I would like--Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The idea behind that movie is unconventional, I agree, but I never took a liking to that film. There’s a dialogue in the movie though which I really like. It goes like this- I wonder if the things that remind me of you, remind you of me. I wonder that too sometimes. It is tiny things which attach us the most to another person. The way they smell, their favourite dish to order at their favourite restaurant, their undying love for their beloved super hero character, the way their face looks when they are fast asleep on a Tuesday morning, their quirks, their eccentricities, their faint smile and fainter frown. It was all of this and so much more that attracted you to me and made me want to love you more and more with every passing day. I know what it is like now to have your happy mood turn into a sour one when your partner is the one having a bad day, not you. Or what it is like to worry about someone, some days for reasons and some days for no reason at all. I know what it is like to wish that all your partner’s worries simply vanish into thin air because you cannot stand to watch them stressed or troubled. I know now what it is like to want the best for your partner, even if you know they don’t deserve the best in everything in life. I know what it is like to not believe in hope and yet hope for your partner; hope for happiness and bright, sunny days and health and success. I know despondence that follows your inability to fix whatever is wrong in your partner’s life. I know what it is like to know that their demons and their darkness and their grief is theirs’ to fight and overcome and still want to be the one to do all of that for them because you cannot see pain cloud their eyes. How I wish I had superpowers sometimes. Believe me, I would use them all to drive away every bad incident, every bad thought, every bad day you’d ever had and ever could. But unfortunately, I am human too, and like you I had my own demons, own darkness and own grief to fight and overcome.
If your tooth hurts, your tongue keeps going there. You are always conscious of a wound.
Ernst Ingmar Bergman
I guess that is why I still wake up with you in my head on some days. And why on some nights you are my last thought before my eyes shut. Maybe that is why they say you can get over love, fall out of it but never fully part ways with it. You are always conscious of a wound. And if it has been healed, then of its memory. The pain lessens with each day, I know. Time does offer some comfort, some relief; at least it did to me. But even if the persistent ache was to go away completely one day, I know I will always remember its existence. And on some days, that is all that you will be, a bittersweet memory.
A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
You come across all sorts of things on the internet today-- facts, fiction, fan-fiction. I remember reading on thepsychmind.com a while back that subconsciously, it takes at least 6 to 8 months for the brain to process complete forgiveness for someone who hurt you emotionally. I do not know how accurate this fact is, and no, I didn’t try to find out either. But let’s assume for a second that it is, for my sake. I wonder if we failed each other because we couldn’t give each other enough time to recover from the emotional scars we both managed to be the cause for, for each other. There was something else that I read on there too which managed to stick with me. It said that being unable to get someone off your mind indicates that you are also on that person’s mind. Really? You think this could be true? Sometimes I wish it was, and sometimes not so much. Was I on your mind because I had you buzzing inside mine or did you leave my mind because I left yours first? I guess I’ll never know. I guess I prefer the unknown right now.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. They say a clean cut heals soonest. There’s nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can’t see or hear or touch a man, it’s best to let him go.”
Some more hard-hitting words from the East of Eden. As you can tell, I am clearly a fan of the book. But what struck a chord with me was the fact that in today’s day and age there were so many relationships held together by the glue of postage stamps, figuratively speaking. So, do we simply let all of those go? Advancements in technology have managed to bring us closer, but physical absence can never be made up by virtual presence. People can make a phone call or write an email or send a text message from any corner of the world to another person sitting thousands of miles away, I know, but they still can’t touch or hear or see their loved ones. Maybe technological advancements have only deepened our illusions of togetherness and companionship. Maybe all that physical distance between you and I would have been easier to manage and overcome if we didn’t disappoint each other over text messages and emails. Maybe words lost meaning in translation so much so that us being together in a room would also not be enough to bridge the gap our souls had managed to establish. We couldn’t promise ourselves to each other in times of need, both happy and sad. We weren’t there to break each other’s fall. You can’t do that over letters written and posted, you just can’t.
I know it seems upsettingly cynical for me to have believed in our end but I think that was me trying to keep it real. However, I had imagined that my life post you would be immensely difficult and unbearably painful, which it surprisingly hasn’t been. There are questions which remain unanswered but I don’t dwell over them anymore. I have been working towards making peace with the fact that your choices served to define you and were your decisions, and didn’t necessarily have much to do with me. That I was important to you at some point in time, but not always. I think about days marred by your absence, because other matters had needed more attention and all that in hindsight doesn’t bother me anymore. I understand that we were two individuals living our lives separately, and that our association was a tiny intersection in the larger scheme of things. I had assumed that I would look back at our time together and the happy days would blur out in comparison to the bad days, and I would only be able to remember the ache, but luckily none of that happened. Maybe our end had been a clean cut. I am relieved to know that memories of beautiful days spent with you manage to warm me up from the inside even today and I am grateful for having loved somebody like that in my life.
“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Marquez
You are the only solution to all the sadness in my heart and awfully also, its cause.
Beau Taplin
I could relate to this very much when you and I were together. Not so much lately, which makes me feel better about my coping mechanism. But having those words resonate so deeply with me back then was how I knew that one day I would have to choose, to either continue being with you or call off our ties once and for all. There is so much that you and time with you has given me, but unfortunately my days with you were numbered, lesser than I would have expected or wanted. I hadn’t wanted to fight for your love or for space in your life because that is not the kind of person I was then and still am not. But what had made it difficult was the fact that I somewhere knew that even if I was to fight, I would lose. Those before me mattered to you more and your love for them overshadowed and overpowered my love for you and your love for mine. But I get it, who am I to complain? I was just someone you had chanced upon one drunken night. Of course, we couldn’t have known that that one conversation would lead to whatever it did lead to next but I guess some roller coaster rides are a complete surprise in life. I think I should have known my place better. And I say this with no malice in my heart. I was just a naïve young woman, who fell for you in an instant. I should have known better, adjusted my expectations sooner, or maybe not have had any, at all.
Words. It is so difficult to trust them. I think I would be willing to trust myself for a moment but words, you can never truly tell. Hidden intention, ambiguous purpose and erratic emotion—that is what I believe words are made of. Weave them into sentences and you are armed with the most lethal weapon on this planet. Words can make you or break you. They can make you believe things about yourself which you knew in the past to be false and make you forget things about yourself which you have always known to be true.
Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.
Whitney Otto
It so happened that I came across these words, weaved together so carefully at a time when I most probably shouldn’t have. I figured quite later on that I didn’t have to stay when it felt like I should have left just to prove a point. I knew promising a forever was a sham, to anybody. I knew I couldn’t expect people to be constants in my life when I was the one who was a variable, a soul with no roots, always in search of a place to call home. Maybe I had mistaken you to be one. I had read somewhere that people can be homes too, but I guess that’s all a sham too. Home is where all attempts to escape cease, said a brilliant man once. But you couldn’t have been the home I was looking for; you were looking to escape and I guess maybe I was too. This is how life teaches you a new lesson with every new experience. You learn, you grow, you move ahead. I don’t think I stayed to prove a point. I held on, for you, for love, but I had to let go. It became demanding to a point where I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to give, or if I even had enough to spare—my love, my time, my patience, my word. I do not like to lie. I keep from it as much as and whenever I can. And I hadn’t wanted to lie, especially to you. That is why it was important for me to be straight with you; so, I stayed when I could and left when I had to.
But enough about love found and lost. Not all goodbyes are dark and dreary. Some ends lead to brighter beginnings and this time, with this goodbye, I wish it’s been more bright for you than it’s been for me.
If someone was to ask me if I would do all of this, all over again, I wouldn’t hesitate to nod my head in the affirmative. I know I only spoke of hurt and disappointment and heartache and heartbreak here but that is not all that my time with you was about. Maybe I’ll write about love and chemistry and butterflies in the stomach and giddiness that accompanies butterflies in the stomach another time. I am sure you wouldn’t mind being my muse once again, would you? I don’t know when or if I’ll stop writing about you and us.
Maybe when another love story comes knocking at my door?
Maybe after another heartbreak?
Or maybe when your memory is so fierce that I cannot not pay any attention to it?
Who knows what will happen?
Maybe you cement deeper into my head and heart.
Or maybe, I wake up one day and you are no longer inside of me, not even an iota of you.
“When the plane crashed, when I heard Cristina’s plane crashed, my first thought was that she was dead, and for a moment I felt relieved. And for a moment…I felt relieved. I felt terrible for feeling it, but it was there. And I always knew on some level she’d leave me, and I wasn’t ready to be hurt like that. So, if she was dead, we would stay frozen in time forever. And she’d be gone, but it wouldn’t be so hard. It wouldn’t be a choice, to walk away, to choose something else, to move to Switzerland and start another life. I was relieved that it was over with a minimum of damage, and I hate myself for that. So, I am not perfect, Amelia. I can be selfish, and I can be scared and I make things harder than I need to. I know I do. I make things hard for us.”
Grey’s Anatomy, Season 12, Episode 5
It was unsettling, to be someone who understood what it felt like to wish for a bad thing in lieu of something worse. I knew that feeling, of wanting a good thing to be frozen in time forever so that no harm could ever befall it. I think I was selfish, and I think I was scared too. I think that is why I am as much to blame or hold responsible for our end as you are. Because maybe if I hadn’t feared, and had tried harder or cared more or stuck around longer, just maybe, we’d still be together.
But that is not how things turned out for us now, did they?
I let things be the way they were. I did however try. Not halfheartedly for sure, but more convinced of my apprehension and doubts than my belief in us. I always knew on some level too that you’d leave me, or that I’d leave you. Either way, back then, I wasn’t ready to be hurt like that, just like Owen. And so, though it bothered me and worried me on days, I sat quietly and let those days pass by until I managed to convince myself once again that we were just fine and better off without labels. Because if we had taken that last step, crossed that line, become something real, there would be no going back to anything and if we were to end then, I was sure it would be the end of my heart forever too.
Sometimes I let myself think that that is how much I loved you, so much so that I kept us from becoming something because the heartbreak and heartache that would follow it would be unbearable. On some days, I tell myself that that’s bullshit and highly self-indulgent and I shouldn’t waste any more time glorifying our story.
I know that this is my side of the tale. All of this is how I saw and felt and understood things between us. And that your version could be, or rather must be completely different than mine. I guess that is how it is with the world, right? Each one of us living a life that nobody else knows of, looking at all that is around us with a different lens.
Maybe we did never know, you me or me you.
Before I end this though, I want to thank you, for bringing love into my life in a way I had never known. And for all the hurt and disappointed and heartache that I ever caused you, I am sorry.
I wish and pray and hope for love for you, so deep and true, that one day, you know nothing else but it.