The Parting Gift ( Part 2 )

He took some time disconnect the call.

The thought of having to meet Asha consumed his anxiety in a very sudden way.  Two years. it had been. Two long years.

He parked his car in the garage and quietly unlocked the door to his apartment. As he reached the table, he slid his car keys across it. They scratched the glass and
landed on the cold marble with a heavy clank. That disturbed him. That sudden noise jolted him back to his anxious self. Strangely enough , this time the anxiety pulled him elsewhere. It pulled him to a part of his wife he had chosen to keep. It was a mere piece of paper he had torn from her diary the day she left. She used to write well, he thought ,and this was his favorite.

” I’ll tell you how it feels, a heartbreak.

It can be the melodramatic heartbreak. Every one can read it off your eyes. Where it feels like heavy metals have been melted hot and poured into your blood. Left to ruthlessly run around every inch of your body, reminding you of stories you want to forget. Hurting every time you choose to blink or move your feet. Or every time you breathe in and breath out. Or every time  you tell your pillow a story about yet another teardrop.

Otherwise it can be a silent one. The one where no one knows what happened and no one has a clue. The one where the heart broke a little everyday. One little part at a time. The one where you outgrew one tear with the next in silence of those nights. The one where your eyes have no story to tell anymore. You become unaware. So unaware, that even your hands didn’t know which way to shuffle when you got accustomed to the eerie sadness.

And I’ll tell you what is dangerous.
The un-preparedness of not knowing in which way your heart shall choose to break. ”

Every time he read it, he felt a twitch in his heart. But this time, a tremor crossed his hand as he folded back the paper. It had grown crumpled by now. The creases had their own little stories. They knew his favorite lines, because they were the ones where his fists clenched tighter onto the page.

He wondered why he chose to walk away. What came back in answer was not what he wanted to hear about himself. So he chose to look away and not listen. He had stopped asking himself questions he was too afraid to know the answers to.

‘But I don’t love you.’

                       ‘But I don’t love you.’ ‘That’s okay.’

I just read something beautiful on the Internet about how sure all of us are about love, and how we just can’t accept that the people who can’t or won’t love us, aren’t broken or incapable of emotions. This reminded me of a guy I dated. He couldn’t get himself to love me and I just kept thinking how unfortunate his existence was. ‘Unable to love me’. That used to exhaust me. I felt like a bunch of photons near a black hole. All I had and all I felt went into him, and nothing came back ever. I kept wondering why sometimes every thing is okay, except the fact that ‘they’ don’t love you back.

That’s our problem. All we have been taught about love is that it teaches us to be better people, makes us more tolerant and loving and how love must most certainly be complete only if we receive. It’s high time people talk about the importance of unrequited love to their kids and fairy tales learn to keep it real. Love can’t always be for the better. Love doesn’t mend, all the time. What about the kind of love that lets people drown themselves in bathtubs? What about the kind of love where people become the monsters inside their heads? Why is that not love? Why is any thing fucked up not love? Obsession. Rebound. Abuse. Why are we so afraid to agree that even love smothers souls, even though love is meant to repair?

If ‘they’ don’t love you back, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation. Sometimes, it doesn’t need mending. Sometimes, it is okay to not be loved back, because ‘they’ are people like you and me, and sometimes, we just mess it up and don’t fall for people like we’re supposed to. So if someone doesn’t love you back, don’t try to make them. They’re not a candle and you’re not a moth. You have wings. Fly away. Love and learn to leave it at that. Fulfillment lies not only in requisition but also in denial. The colors are different and yes, you’ll cry yourself to sleep for a week or two, but then, that’s that. Heal. Tragedy is beautiful, yes, but learn to know that sometimes, you’ve had your share.

‘Even love unreturned has its rainbow.’ 

Let it rain, human. Let it at least rain.