Tag: relationships

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.

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.

Biennale 1 : AspinWall House

Her hairs shifted in the breeze that made its way into Aspinwall House from the sea, the familiar smell of hair oils tinged with sweat reaching him.

Her hairs shifted in the breeze that made its way into Aspinwall House from the sea, the familiar smell of hair oils tinged with sweat reaching him. They were curly today because the hair was still wet and there was too much oil in them, with thick wavy strands where dry.

“കിളിവന്നു കൊഞ്ചിയ ജാലകവാതിൽ..”

A middle-aged uncle urgently attended to his loud ringing phone, shuffling in embarrassment and looking around in apology for his ringtone, in all likelihood a mistake by an impatient adolescent son or a daughter. A short woman, probably his wife, identified the song and turned from the queue ahead in front of the black-and-white freedom photographs.

The song brought to mind ill-lit library aisles, shining bright eyes and shy faces too close to each other. The young couple looked at each other and grinned.

“Your armpits are a river.” Her humour was either inappropriate or scathing.
“Yea Kochi’s melting.”
They moved out of the building. Sure enough, everyone on the grounds stuck to the shades of trees and the building, from volunteers to visitors to students running to avoid the sun. Their faces glistened in perennial tropical sweat.

“You know, I think I could’ve squeezed in my final year workshop project somewhere here, it’s got more effort to it than this representative solitary tyre with a measly description.”
“It’s the message that counts, isn’t that what they say. Plus they’d have arranged a JCB and all that.”
“Why aren’t you in a sari? I expected you’d be.”
“Well I expected you’d come naked.”
“Some day. You’re welcome though.” He grinned.

The rooms on the first floor were filled with portraits.
“I’m pretty sure we’re missing something. Something big and important. I’m getting bored.” She leaned up at him staring at a frame.

“She’s got a snake on her face.”
“Snakes.”
“Maybe she bites.”
“It’s probably the rest of the world, not her.”
“Is it poisonous?”
“Should I google?” He had already taken out his phone.
“Let’s just go paint.”

On their way down the stairs was a wall with rows of “Don’t die” handwritten and struck out, right next to suicidal diary notes and pin-ups.

“How much do you think the model was paid to wear snakes on her face?”
“Aaa, ariyilla.”
“If you could put up a single exhibit here, what’d you keep?”
“Us?” He knew he didn’t have to pitch in, the question wasn’t really for him. And yet, between being romantic and sounding cliché, he always leaned towards the latter, armed and betrayed by his limited creativity (which I wouldn’t say is a crime.*)
“I’d keep a picture of me, staring back at everyone from my photo,” she attempted to sound arrogant, answering her own question.
“What are you?” He played along.
“Just me, out-of-step with the world and compressed into a frame – and they’d pass me by, mostly bored and blank. A few make attempts at decrypting me, to make sense. But none of them do, and I stare back at them.”
“Isn’t that what I said? Us?”

“Okay, you’re good today.”

Smart quips were his novelty.

She drew a heart on her portion of the glass wall. A little further away, he painted a house with 2 squares on either sides for windows, a door and a sloping roof, already fading as the water dried.

She extended a long arrow from her fading heart and pierced it into the fading door.

“My heart is a heart and yours is just a door”, she smiled stupidly and made a face at him.
“Mine’s a house.”
“Oh wow I hadn’t thought of that.”
-pause-
“Kollaallo.”

They watched their paintings vanish. A tease once in a while was okay.
She was too proud to lose and he liked her too much to let her.

*That’s me placing up my disclaimer inline, much like Prithviraj in Lucifer

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