Tag: love

Heartbreak – At 28

Life can be surprising, even scandalous, but somehow we manage to surprise ourselves more.

I am aware that as an single unmarried woman I should wait until marriage to write this, or to share anything related to love for that matter, like all good girls do. Now that all of us are over it, let’s move on.

The first thing you do after a heartbreak is remove all of what were your songs from your current playlist. Otherwise you run the risk of Spotify selecting it randomly from your list, and you breaking into a fit of crying while driving on Interstate 20 at 8.30AM on your way to work. If you don’t want to lose the songs, move them to a non-current playlist so you can play them at a future time when your heart is mended, the memories have been overwritten and the songs don’t poke you anymore.

Today morning I woke up and was watching a video on Insta, as you do on Sunday mornings, and somebody mentioned something about drooling. It hit a nerve and reminded me of the time J once drooled on me, and both of us broke into laughter. For a moment my still-foggy and freshly heartbroken brain couldn’t place when it had happened on our timeline.

It struck me that it’s only been a couple of weeks since then and I’m already forgetting details. We had such a short time together, and if I don’t want to “lose” these memories I should probably write them down. At some point. But do I want to “keep” them?

I’m a huge believer that we all have only a short while in each other’s lives (well, ideally more than a couple months which was the case with J, but anyway), so I tend to keep my love close and my memories closer. This time, I don’t know if I want to keep them, let alone keep them close, which is very, very unlike me.

I remember once going to Pious Achan and telling him I’d learnt something about myself. Pious Achan had replied, We’re always discovering new things about ourselves. That was five years ago.
Life can be surprising, even scandalous, but somehow we manage to surprise ourselves more.

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Falling

“Holy shit”

This is an unkind beginning to a story, I am borrowing it nonetheless.

“Holy shit”

My ex knew me before we met. He told me he had a feeling he’d fall in love with me, and then we met and he did fall. His words.

When I was in grad school, I had a classmate I liked. I had just broken up with the ex, I decided I wasn’t going to crush on this guy, and it probably wasn’t nice cos we were classmates and what if we ended up in a group project together? It was a semi-professional program and surely it wasn’t nice.
I imagine there’s a huge chunk of population that finds it off-putting when people do everything intentionally. I find it detestable myself, but it’s how I’m wired. Years later all I can think of is, Not nice? ACCORDING TO WHO?

Only until late Spring though, when another classmate asked me out. I was surprised cos I thought, Wait, that’s allowed? Unfortunately we didn’t go back to college after Spring break, and then we had classes and assignments, and those things took over.

Then I met someone last year. I knew them before we met in person, I knew they were committed already, and I was very scared I’d fall for them. So this was just another crush that I was going to gulp down and hopefully turn into nothingness. I remember meeting them for the first time and thinking Holy shit. This was going to be hard.

It doesn’t help that everyone else I meet or have met haven’t come close, or that my best friend says he must be something since I’ve talked about him as much if not more than my ex. I know I’m doing myself a disservice, but after days and weeks and months I think at this point I’m just calling a spade a spade.

I watched Fleabag today. The ending was moving, because I know what it’s like to like someone who’s not available, and to move on with life unimpressed (in Fleabag the dude was married to God).

Anyway, I like the elevator scene from 500 Days Of Summer. I like how I have tried multiple times to intentionally control feelings and then failed every time. Luckily actions are less involuntary.

#15 Postcard – Switching POV (Barfi! movie)

There’s no way to run when your past corners you like that, at Puja dukaan counter with the Prestige pressure cooker.

“Wo jo ruki si raah baaki hai
Wo jo ruki si chaah baaki hai..”

– Phir Le Aya Dil, Barfi! (2012 )

You’d think things would have changed after 6 years. After Jhilmil, things have. Yet so much hasn’t and you do not know until your past shows up right in front of you.

Barfi saw his past through the stained glassdoor of Puja dukaan, now dressed in a starched cotton saree. The saree was unfamiliar but his pulse rose as he identified the figure through the glass. Shruti – he engraved on the new Prestige cooker, hands shaking.

He swallowed the knot in his throat, combed his hair down, pasted an all-too-easy smile and walked out to the main shop to meet her.

When she finally turned to him she smiled surprised, her eyes vulnerable as their last goodbye, while the scarlet of her sindoor stared down at him.

Barfi smiled back.

He smiled at the lie that you stop loving somebody once they leave your life. That one day, 6 years later when they show up, they will not take you right back to where they left you, a moustache-less heartbroken 20 year-old chasing after her bicycle and running along on her busrides.

He smiled, and this time Barfi knew well enough to not fall.

The ends of her saree were wet from the outpour, Shruti mumbled a goodbye as she stepped onto the road where her husband awaited.

Heartbreaks are hard not because of rejection. Heartbreaks are hard because of the shared future that crashes down before your eyes, because of the pretty-faced kids and grandkids you won’t raise together, bus rides with them that you missed and the what-ifs that haunt for long after.
There’s no way to run when your past corners you like that, at Puja dukaan counter with the Prestige pressure cooker.

On the street, the man switched on the engine to go home. He looked smart. He probably read their kids bedtime stories to sleep, sang to the tunes of the radio and listened to her daily complaints. He probably woke her up from sleep by whispering her name, the name he could only do a botched job at engraving. Barfi watched as Shruti walked into the car, colorful bangles tracing her slender arm.

Jhilmil taught him that one can love again. Life reminded him there’s nothing quite like first love.

PS : I wrote this as part of Switching POV exercise for my writing workshop. I didn’t like it enough then because my narrative voice didn’t feel authentic, but it doesn’t seem too bad now 🙂

Modern Love – What’s the catch?

So the roommates from his stories turned out to be his parents. On which date does the cat turn out to be his child?

For what feels like the first time, I am not thrilled by when Blinding Lights starts playing – just as he tells me he’s recently divorced after a five year marriage. As recently as in the last 6 months.

I see, I say, quick to add a not-too-intrusive follow up question after registering that I see’s are my go-to in Zoom meetings precisely because they are too plain, too matter-of-fact and definitely too insensitive for this first-date exchange. I am glad the lights at “the grill place” aren’t too bright, yet our faces were fixated on each other’s and one couldn’t miss it if I so much as slightly grimaced, which I didn’t.

It’s not an off-putting detail. It’s probably just something you might want to mention on your Tinder bio, or at least reveal in the early conversations.

Okay, I guess this is in fact early. He did get that right.

I’m over it already as we talk about the books we left unfinished growing up, and at length about our Harry Potter houses (he was definitely Ravenclaw). Yet in the 4-second pause before we resumed talking about our families, the skepticism bounced back briefly.

Yes it’s early, it’s theoretically the safest spot in the early spectrum to introduce the fact – I can now imagine upvoted Reddit answers to the thread When should I tell my date … ? Yet it’s a bit disenchanting when it follows another reveal of his roommates, whose lifestyles he had elaborated within the walls of Tinder, turning out to be his parents. On which date would the cat turn out to be his child? Too harsh perhaps but there’s a reason that stuff is usually on a bio.

But of course one had to meet to really find out : dress up, delight in fussing over whether to wear sneakers or light heels, change outfits since it says it’s going to be chilly at night, change outfits again to not appear too dressy yet not too casual.

We talk about prints and Tokyo and it’s genuinely fun. Once in a while my thoughts drifted further than my eyes did, as did his I’m sure.

I caught the father and kids sipping drinks from their tall straws at the table behind him, and I had the inevitable thought of whether I had a similar piece to compare to his –

What was my catch, then?

And was this the mirage of all dating apps? That everyone told each other How else do you meet people during the pandemic, but really nobody on there was pursuing good old love as they claimed they were? That all the seeming effort on real talk was in fact devoted to changing the narrative of real-life stories and setting stage for slipping in disclosures at the perfect time?
I am not an accomplice in all of this, surely?

For a brief moment I saw a fleeting image of myself as the protagonist in Modern Love’s Doorman episode. Except there was no Guzmin to disapprove of the guys, only me, ending up reading all day on park benches with my legs curled up and riding my bike to cozy cafes – alone.

The thought was more amusing than unpleasant, and I tried to grace a full smile to mask any other emotion. I think we were onto discussing the strangeness of allergies of freshly-cut grass and strawberries at that point.

I later wondered, as one must I assume, if there was something about my profile that conveyed to emotionally unavailable men that I’d serve as an accessory to their early healing/moving-on journeys (because this wasn’t the first time). I’m open-minded and we all have our own deals going on, but I’m not sure any of us want to mess with it unless it were worth everyone’s time.

It suffices to say we had a great evening, and for that I’m glad. I really should’ve asked about the cat. Too late.

An evening of sad songs

Ah the good songs and places and things people ruin for us

I wish I didn’t have a headache from lying in bed
Listening to sad songs
Crying
About the old lover, over an estranged parent
It wasn’t meant to go far
But you know how it is on Saturday evenings
One thing leads to another
And before you know it, you’ve taken it one too far.

Ruined what could have been a perfectly nice night
Sipping sweet lime soda with no bubbles in it
The way I like it

This song here, he hated how everyone was singing or talking about it
And I knew I’d ruin it if I translated for him
We’d both hate it in fact.
So I told him it was a nice song
Not how it sounded like us.

Ah the good songs and places and things people ruin for us
The old lover, with his unnecessary soft singing between kisses
That you swoon over, only to break your heart in later
And a parent with their loving lullabies
That later turned too cold and distant and everything in between

The songs come back sooner or later, when one day you think
To revisit the goodness that once was
That you’re ready.
Perhaps not never though, on a less sad note –
Maybe just not tonight.

So it could’ve been a perfect Saturday night sipping sweet lime soda
The way I like it with the bubbles all out
I simply got it all wrong, again.

Featured image : Bawra mann

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