Friday, January 4, 2013

The Non-existent


It’s the moment between wakefulness and sleep when he lingers. That particular moment when your breathing becomes even and sleep starts to take a claim on you but then you can still hear even the minutest of sounds---including the beating of your own heart. It was at this instant when I first thought that I love him, finally admitted that I love him, eventually believed that this emotion will last forever.

He believed in perfect timing. He sticks by this principle, knowing that whatever amount of effort one puts in, if not in accordance with the pulse of the universe, will just all fall into waste. So, in his young heart, he kept the picture of a distant future---a picture with subjects of him and I. Despite his belief that the timing of the blossoming of his love was wrong, he didn’t put a chain on his emotions though. He loved me with a love that can be mustered by his 16-year old heart, but he vowed to wait. Now there is a certain dignity in deciding to wait when you are sixteen. It makes your love all the more innocent and pure, in between being sweet and bitter. And lately, it made me think that it ended just like that, bittersweet.

He’s got a thing for pens and blank pages of white paper. He prefers writing letters, the real kind, in long hand. His writing has a certain kind of sharpness in it, a certain kind of crisp. And I think this is where we clash. His writings are like objects in daylight---sharp, detailed  and at times, painful. While mine are objects in the dark, lit only by the moonlight and the street side lamppost ---dewy, subtle and at times, poignant.  I should’ve sensed it the moment I anxiously opened that first letter in his neat longhand. I should’ve  known exactly at that moment that the words weren’t speaking about the future. Instead, those words are speaking of a distant past at present---words in paper made brittle by time, merely words in yellowed pages.

He loves the night. He especially loved stargazing. That’s one in the numerous entries in his soft side list,  despite how tough he projects to be. He once told me that he developed a liking for this activity when he first caught a glimpse of a willowy, wide-eyed girl who was waiting for her turn to peep at a telescope during one of his grade school camps. I jokingly said that that nobody remembers a girl from their grade school camps. He mussed up my hair then, telling me how silly my thoughts are. Of course he remembers, he said. He remembers because It was me. And I became exactly just that, a memory.

He despises tears, especially ones which are coming from a woman. But in reality, it’s his way of hiding a particular weakness---that he couldn’t stand tears because it would render him vulnerable. And he couldn’t handle that. I wondered, really wondered at one point if he would’ve waited just like what he claimed when he was sixteen if I openly cried in front of him, if I made such a big fuss and drama of the fact that he never fully understood my silence. He never saw the sharpness and the rawness of my emotions that were softened by the dewy glow of that single lamp post that was him in my heart.

There was a time when he lingered between wakefulness and sleep---a particular time when the world is done asking favors from me, from both of us. Sometimes, it was the memory that lingers. At other times, words. Often, it was the possibilities---the “what-could-have-beens”.

But he doesn’t anymore---doesn’t linger, doesn’t haunt.

Time waited patiently for me to heal, which he wasn’t able to do. He is now but a distinct character in my writings, the pen and paper gave me a gift of release from him through poetry and prose. The night became my solace too, not from painful wounds which have long healed, but solace with the possibility of new beginnings. I don’t despise tears like he does because those very same tears which I shed only proved how strong this heart is---how capable it is to feel such great emotions  like love, and loss.

Lingering, he doesn’t do that anymore. I’m glad.

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