Paulo Coelho once wrote, ‘I think it’s important to realize you can miss something, but not want it back’.
There is much in life that you can learn only with time and this was one of those things. I spent the entire night, or whatever was left of it, after receiving Kaiyo’s text message in pain. I was confused and worried and anxious and tired. I still hadn’t figured what to make of Sara meeting with me and saying all of those things in the office a couple of hours ago. I didn’t know if Simone had lied to me, right to my face because he was protecting Kaiyo’s secret or if he too didn’t know anything about it. What made me worry the most was if Sara had actually been right about Kaiyo’s father being sick again and Simone had gone to great lengths to keep it hidden from me, then how bad could it possibly be that Kaiyo didn’t want people to know. I knew she was a private person and family was extremely close and important to her, so if something serious was up, I know she wouldn’t have a lot of people in on it. But another thought that was gnawing at me was that if indeed Mr. Hoccane wasn’t in the best shape, Kaiyo had considered letting somebody else at the office know and not me. She had made a conscious decision to not reach out to me for help, or to let me know or simply think of me as a friend in her time of distress and call me up to go to the hospital with her because she’d wanted family around. It is terrible to have somebody alive haunt you. It leaves a stain on your soul that’s got no home remedy that can ever fix it. That was how Kaiyo and the time I had spent with her had become. It would come back whenever it wanted to and cast dark clouds over my heart and mind. It was excruciating; every single time. There would be days when I’d go to bed patting myself on the back about not having thought of Kaiyo even once during the day and lose a wining battle right then. It didn’t count, did it, if you actively invested time in thinking how you didn’t think about a certain somebody day in and day out now, did it?
I felt belittled by my own thoughts but instead of concentrating on Mr. Hoccane’s possibly deteriorating health I couldn’t help but stop myself from recognizing my ostracization from Kaiyo’s life. I hadn’t realized that maybe she hadn’t given so much importance to us not being together anymore like how I had. I had only assumed that like how I always spoke of her and checked on her with Simone, she did too. That if she’d read a quote in the magazine about lost love it would instantaneously make her think of me like how it would always only make me think of her. I had assumed her pain from our separation because I know how deeply it had hurt me but I was beginning to think that maybe that hadn’t been the case with her. I was not downgrading her loss and pain from the end of our relationship and neither was I questioning its intensity; I was only coming to the realization that it had meant different things to us. It is sad to know that all of your doubts and concerns and bad thoughts about a relationship had only been true all along. The conversation we had had at my office, the night we had broken up, came rushing back to me. It did indeed hurt so much more; not the knowing that she didn’t love me like how I did or had but that I had been right all along to harbor ideas along that line in my head from the very beginning of our relationship. I understood that people could be together but at different places in their head but with the two of us, there would have never been a time when we’d be on the same page, reading the same book.
The night was turning into a night of revelations for me. I realized how my love hadn’t touched her life the way me loving her had touched mine. I began to ask myself if I had been wrong in loving her too much. Had I been foolish and naïve in wanting to write her poems, in wanting to capture her essence and paint it into art? Had writing her letters just because I had failed to contain the feeling only been a failure of my self-control? Had my sense of practicality vanished when I had dreamt of living my whole life with her? Had I been wrong and still was, by including her in my prayers every minute? If she hadn’t cared so much as to even let me know that something was troublesome at home, then why was I so worried about it? I wasn’t a part of her life anymore and apparently I hadn’t become important enough while I had been in it for her to fill me in. It was only getting tedious to sadden myself over us and Sayan Sen’s words floating in my head weren’t helping either. Maybe in the past, in those moments, loving Kaiyo had been exactly what I had wanted but I couldn’t not feel angry about having spent too much energy on the wrong love.
Kaiyo and her memories hadn’t faded with time and neither had they disappeared overnight. I had tucked them away somewhere, in the deep and dark recesses of my heart because I knew that I couldn’t do with or without them. They were safe there, accessible when I needed them to be and far out of reach when I needed that. I walked around the house one last time to ensure everything was in its place, switched off the corridor lights and resigned to the bed with Thumper tagging along. I kissed him a good night and switched my brain off. I had had enough for the day; it was time to let bygones be bygones and focus on what new life was to offer. I did not wish to be somebody who resided in their past. My present was healthy and my future promising. I decided to let Kaiyo turn into another chapter in the book that was my life and tucked myself into bed, hoping that the days to come would be brighter and calmer. This was to be the end of it, this was to be the end of Kaiyo and I.