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.
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