FIFTEEN-LOVE

JULY 2016

The storm is beginning. She looks up from the book she is nose deep in. Grinds her teeth out of habit. Ugh. She hates rain and she hates storms. Cursing under her breath, she gets up from the cross-legged position she was in on her king-sized bed, rubs her legs to soothe out the pins and needles, puts on her slippers and shuffles out to ensure all the windows are shut and that there are no clothes hanging on the wire. She can see the rain pouring now in heavy sheets and her body gives an involuntary shudder. Thank heavens she decided to cancel her grocery run today. She’d have been ambushed and soaked to the bones. Laziness can actually come in handy sometimes, she smiles to herself. Little does she know that this storm that is upturning trash cans and making people run for cover is a scented breeze compared to the one that lies ahead in her life.

OCTOBER 2017

M: Hey dear. Time spent with you was time well spent. You will be missed 😊

S: That’s what I wanted to say. You stole my line.

M: Don’t forget me 😉

S: That’s not possible. And again, that’s what I wanted to say ☹

M: haha, do you think you are someone I can forget ?!

S: yeah, just like your car that I’m missing sooo much 😉

M: Whenever you say, we’ll go for a drive...at night 😉

S: That would be one night I’d never want to end. Whenever you’re free…

As she turns her phone to silent and blushes into her pillow, she knows there’s no chance of sleep tonight. She cannot believe this is happening and its happening to her. What are the odds? This time last year she’d been in her third consecutive year of depression after the person she’d had a one sided relationship with (a family friend’s son, Alyan Ariz) for five years and endlessly dreamt of marrying had dumped her over a phone call informing her that he was getting married within a month and that he ‘wouldn’t’ be able to talk to her anymore. Her naivety had ruined her life. It was her first brush with love and no one had told her that love is so not like in the movies. You can’t just pine for someone and then one day, if you just love/suffer enough, they will magically become yours. No one had told her any of this. And so she’d valiantly suffered one rebuke after another, with the firm belief that one day he’d wake up and realize she was the only one for him and they would be married and live happily ever after.  She winces now as she remembers all her stupidities; she’s learnt her lesson well. Love isn’t love; real, tangible, actual; unless it is equally reciprocated. Period.

She’d first seen M one month after her internship had begun, in September. It was the first time in years she’d seen someone other than Alyan and felt something. It was also the moment she forgot Alyan had ever existed. Filled with an overpowering exhilaration she had asked around as discretely as possible and found out that he was a PG Year 2 and that miraculously, she had been assigned to the same unit that he was in! It was fate. Their interaction began on the first day itself, and she found him just as extraordinarily amazing as he looked. He was short, 5ft5inch at best, extremely fair skinned and wore intelligent glasses. But it was the constant animation of his face that she could never stop looking at. He was a tour de force, a walking talking paragon of the phrase 'joie de vivre'. Always on the move, conversing with patients and nurses and other doctors with a ready smile for anyone. At first, she was shocked he would even notice her amongst all the other interns, let alone single her out for conversation. She was aware that she was beautiful, had heard it enough times in just the last month with one of the residents plainly informing her that she was going to be asked out a lot. She never believed it. But miracle after miracle kept coming round the corner, as she began to notice him dropping a line with her at least once a day. A conspirational smile. A wink. She was over the moon.

 And then two weeks later he had a presentation in front of the surgery faculty which included all the interns. She was the first one in the auditorium, at 8am sharp. It began half an hour later and he was having no joy in the cross-questioning round. She’d taken a split-second decision and ordered the best chocolate cake she could buy, with ‘Congratulations Dr.M’ sprawled in icing on top. Her only intention was to see a smile on his face after such a grueling morning. The cake arrived and she panicked. She got one of the male nurses to take the cake to him and not mention her name, or where the cake had come from. Morning turned to night and all the interns were called for dinner in the common room of that unit. She entered the room, sweating profusely wondering what had happened and why she had done such an idiotic thing in the first place. As they all sat around a huge table filled with takeout boxes from multiple restaurants, one of the residents said, ‘hey, get the cake. It’s in the refrigerator.’ She pinched her nose and awaited her metaphorical execution. A nurse returned with the cake and there were hoots and cheers and she’d looked at him and he was blushing. Sure enough, the residents proceeded to tease the living daylights out of her, and she realized the nurse had blabbed the truth. She excused herself and ran out back to the emergency room, drowning herself in patient files. Just as her breathing had begun to calm down a bit, she felt a hand thrust froward in her direction. It was him. He looked so shy, so coy, that it completely wiped out her own mortification. ‘Can I at least shake your hand for this?’ he asked. It was the beginning. She hadn’t meant for it to be anything, but it had and she soon found his feelings to mirror her own even though nothing was said explicitly.

All too soon it was her last day in the unit and she was crushed with the fear that this was it and that she would never see him again. Had she grossly misinterpreted all his friendly overtures? Was she just another intern to him? Could she please just look into his mind for one second and truly know how he felt about her? Thankfully her fears had been assuaged by night when she’d seen his message on her phone and nearly died with relief. So he felt it too! It was real, she hadn’t imagined it!

He asks her out officially the very next morning and she accepts immediately. No point in playing hard to get. She knows they are both aware of the insane attraction between them. She takes extra care with her clothes and make up and goes to the salon to get her hair straightened, even though her hair is already pretty straight. He picks her up at exactly 8, and its the most magical night she has ever experienced. The conversation flows without a stop, and before she knows it, they’re back outside her house. He is a thorough gentleman and she goes to bed that night; spent with the burden of such unprecedented bliss.

NOVEMBER 2018

‘It’s a conference. But it gets over in the day and I’m totally free afterwards. Three days.’ This is the first time since the beginning of the relationship anything like this has ever come up. She is beyond ecstatic and already planning the web of lies she has to spin to be allowed to go to another city for three days. The past year has been nothing short of a dream, the kind of dream you never want to wake up from. She has been reborn sans any past wounds. She feels as light and carefree as she did when she was a child. And its all his doing. His presence, his aura that makes her forget everything when she is with him, his arms around her that rejuvenate her soul. She can’t imagine how she has been alive all these years without him. Each day she thinks, so this is what all the hue and cry is about; all the romantic movies and the novels and the TV shows; she so gets it now. She feels like a character in every love scene she has ever seen. And now, this amazing opportunity, right after their first anniversary? It couldn’t be more perfect if it came wrapped in a bow.

They book a hotel for three days and arrive with all the expectations of a couple going on their first trip. She has shopped for new clothes to wear for each day and roams around in the enormous malls all day while he attends his conference. They spend the evenings having dinner at fancy restaurants and strolling arm in arm along the streets, oblivious to everything but each other. She feels her heart plummeting into her ankles on the third day when its time to leave and begs him to prolong their stay for another day. ‘No.’ He looks straight ahead with an expression that says, that is not happening. She looks gob smacked at him, at his bluntness; to the point of being rude. They have had their minor misgivings in the past but she has never before heard him use this tone. She is speechless throughout their drive back and is embarrassed to feel tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. ‘Hey, come on now, don’t cry on me please. Look, it just wasn’t possible; I have to rejoin tomorrow, I’ve missed my rounds and the schedule is so packed, you know how it is.’ His half hearted apology does nothing to lift her mood. In fact it dampens it further and she begins to wonder if she is setting herself up for heart break all over again. But that’s not possible, it can’t be, she tells herself. This is a mutual relationship. It has been since the beginning. She puts all her doubts into a box at the back of her mind and tries to justify his behavior. By the time they reach home she has forgotten the whole episode and kisses him goodnight with all the love she has in her heart.

DECEMBER 2019

S: Can I ask you a question. Am I a joke to you?

M: Can you come to the point, I'm studying.

S: Studying? Seriously? You've been online for the past two hours and haven’t even bothered to reply to my message. So don’t tell me you're studying.

M: I wasn’t studying then, but I am now. Anyway, what do you want to talk about?

S: Call me. Now.

Another heated argument. She cannot believe, even as she goes through this fruitless back and forth with him, how her life has unraveled in the past year. Where is that delightful, charming guy she met two years ago and who is this rude, insensitive, unfeeling and unbelievably selfish impostor? The curtains were not lifted at once. There were glitches, little peeks here and there; messages were not replied to for at least an hour even though she would reply to each message of his in under a minute. If she would bring it up, he’d simply say, ‘So who's asking you to reply immediately?! You can take an hour too; I don’t mind at all.’ And there it was. The bane of her existence. He didn’t mind at all. He didn’t mind if she replied after an hour; he didn’t mind if they didn’t meet for months on end; he didn’t mind if she was angry or hurt or upset; he just didn’t mind.  She had known he had a strong work ethic from the moment she met him and it was one of the things she admired most about him. Until it wasn’t. Until one day he casually told her over the phone that he didn’t care about anything or anyone if it interfered with his schedule or caused him any inconvenience whatsoever vis-à-vis his studies. She’d tried to make light of the situation by slyly implying that she was definitely more important to him than just ‘anyone’; but to her horror he’d flat out said, ‘nope’. It was not so much the words that would burn her, it was the way he would say them. Like he wanted to tear her apart. His mood swings were incorrigible. One day he’d be all smiles and the next, he’d snap at her so abruptly that she would end up in tears. And there would be no apology, ever. Not even an acknowledgement of his appalling disposition.

She asks herself for the hundredth time: why did he start being so mean to her all of a sudden? So emotionally and physically unavailable? She already knows the answer. A person doesn’t just transform into someone else, its always there. But it can be masked for a finite period of time, in order to impress or dupe; and she has been both impressed and duped by him in a way that she could have never fathomed. And now, after two years, he just can’t be bothered to keep up the charade anymore. Its as simple as that.

JUNE 2020

‘So, what’s up? How’s your prep going?’

‘Yeah, good; just, you know, stressed out all the time. This entrance is going to be brutal.’

‘Its fine, you’ll nail it. I mean, we barely even talk on the phone. Three months ago you were all over me saying all those things about how we’d meet again soon and how badly you miss me and I’ve just been waiting since, as usual.’

‘I’m not interested in you anymore. I mean, not that interested.’

She grips her phone till she can feel the blood pulsating wildly against her fingertips. There’s almost a two-minute-long pregnant pause and she waits for him to fill it, to say just kidding, or to change the topic or to explain that that came out wrong and he didn’t mean it. She waits. But he’s quiet. He’s actually waiting for a reply. She tries to unglue her tongue from the roof of her mouth to get a handle on the situation but its already too late. Her self-worth has crawled out from some hidden crevice within her and found a voice. ‘You know what, it’s over.’

She gets off the phone somehow and sinks to the ground, wishing to be under, rather than over it. Her hands and feet are both trembling and she can’t breathe. What just happened? Did they just break up? No, of course not. This has happened loads of times before, the 'mock' break up. But..it doesn’t feel like it this time. It feels…real. She's frozen at the same spot for an hour, her phone clutched in her hand. She thinks back to the last month and the month before that, the calls and the jokes and the laughter and him saying ‘I love you’ at the end of each of those calls, even though getting him to say those words on a call was like pulling teeth. She’d been really happy since then, relieved that her relationship was back on track and that she had nothing to worry about. He had admitted many a time that he was a bit bipolar when it came to his moods and that he would get ‘flights of ideas’ in his head all the time. She’d listened and understood and forgiven him for all the insults and the rudeness and the phone calls to other girls behind her back. She’d let it all go. And just like that, one month later, he ruins it all. There is only so much insensitivity a person can bear. She gets up and walks away from her phone, her mind commencing to adapt to its new state.

AUGUST 2022

She looks at the couple waltz by her at the H&M outlet, and has to suppress a smirk. Its been two years since her breakup and in all this time, she’s learnt so much about herself and about people that she almost feels grateful for the heart break and ensuing depression that she’d had to go through. It was mind numbing and excruciatingly painful but eventually she did reach the grass on the other side, the side she’d always wanted to escape. She has realized that all those years pining for a ‘mutual’ romance were years wasted. Because there is no such thing. At the end of the day, even a ‘two-sided’ relationship is hardly ever an equal partnership. Mostly, it’s the girl or woman who ends up doing all the work while the guy just goes into cruise control after a couple of years. And the genuinely good ones, they really are one in a million; so what are the odds of you ever finding one? The grass isn’t greener here or there, it’s what you make of the side you’re on.

She looks up. The couple has started arguing. She can’t suppress it this time. She smirks.