I finally met you and it was… disappointing, underwhelming, incomplete.
What you will never know is that after everyone in my house went to sleep that night, I sat alone in the darkness of the living room and cried. I had been so sure that seeing you wasn’t going to affect me, not after all this time. But somehow it did. It was as if an old, forgotten wound had opened up inside me, except this time, I wasn’t mourning the loss of you. I was mourning the loss of what we could’ve been. But how do you even begin to mourn the loss of something that never was? That’s like being neither here nor there. Like a strange limbo. Like a ghost - a shadow of both life and death but not completely either. You always were in a hurry, weren’t you? To talk to me, to flirt with me, to tell me that you loved me, even to abandon me when things got difficult. And me? At no point in our little story was I ever ready for any of it. So I ran after you to play catch up. Every. Single. Time.
I hate the way that we ended when I knew that we’d never really started. Maybe those few months meant nothing, maybe they were a mere blip in the larger picture of your life but I hate you for taking away my power, for not allowing me a say in a decision that would affect my life too. You recklessly jumped into the deep end and I jumped after you without knowing how to swim. Because I knew you wouldn’t let me drown. I found out how wrong I was only when you swam away at the sight of the first real trouble and left me to fight my way out of the water. And I did - coughing, panting, spluttering - but, I did.
I had to walk through fire to reach where I am today - I had to take the toughest possible road there was. The only way I could really move on was by accepting the possibility that maybe you had never really loved me the way that I had loved you - even make peace with the fact that maybe you had never really loved me at all. You always insisted that I was wrong about this, but this was probably the only way I knew I’d find any closure - closure, which you refused to give me. How could you have moved on so easily if you really did love me? Was I so easy to get over? So easy to forget? Does it make me selfish to wonder how you didn’t have as terrible a time as I did? Why did it not hurt you as much as it hurt me? With everything said and done, did it all really mean nothing?
I’d never thought I’d finally meet you this way. Not a single scenario among the million different ones I’d made up in my head, would’ve turned out like this - bland, almost indifferent. I had so many things to say to you when I finally saw you, but you had to leave. Leaving comes naturally to you, doesn’t it? Back then, you were always in a hurry to leave. After all this time, you still are. And after all this time, I’m still not ready for it.
Except this time, I will not run after you to catch up. You broke my heart once and I let you. But I’ve endured so much more after that. I endured it all alone. I hardened through that loss and countless others that followed. Old wounds might surprisingly still be tender but the rest of me is not. It would take a lot more to break me again. Or maybe, just maybe, my heart has finally turned to stone.
You are a good man. There aren’t too many of you in this world anymore. I am grateful to have the privilege of saying that I loved a good man. But for you, my darling - what a privilege it is to say that you had the tenderest heart in the world, and all you knew to do with it was break it into a million tiny pieces.
- Gayatri Shejwal (October 2022)
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