R Left. I am Here Still.
I have been avoiding writing like this. Just sitting down and pouring it out. It leaves you very exposed to yourself and you don’t have control over what you feel. R left. She had to, I did not give her enough reasons to stay. Actually, I think towards the end, I gave her more reasons to leave. It’s a failure that I used to carry in my chest, and now I carry it in my stomach; I also carry it sometimes in my neck. The very act of putting words to events and feelings disconnects them from fiction. One can always choose to write lies, but the fingers are going to move towards the unflinching truth, one that screams inside my head, “You are not enough.” Even as I write this, I am secretly hoping that R reads this and understands that I am broken without her and comes back. She used to tell me once or twice that I was quite an ordinary person. I made a face every time she said that. I don’t like being ordinary, and I did not like hearing it. “There’s nothing wrong with being ordinary, I am ordinary.” As much as I still detest it, this is a pretty standard breakup text one writes in their privacy. I wasn’t enough. Why did they not stay? I can’t breathe without them. Am I being dramatic so that other people feel pity?; pretty ordinary emotions. So does that mean there was nothing extraordinary about the love? It was extraordinary. We only saw each other for 10 days, even less. And for 1 and a half years, we were enamoured of each other. My friend said that since there was love, she stayed. But unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. A lesson I paid an exuberant fee to learn. I wanted to write this without judgment. I am still writing unencumbered, but I am continuously judging what sentences actually spout out.
There are days when this is a poem, there are days when this is a metaphor, today it is just a lament. A diary entry in a day, I write about it. She is alone, too. We sat almost every Sunday on a video call, she made some tea, sometimes even I made tea, and we used to sit and listen to songs together. She did not like talking too much, especially at that time. Tea is still made, songs are still played, but there is only remembrance. Not me sitting there, making her laugh, making her cringe, making her forget about the world. It’s odd that out of everything beautiful we shared, I miss that.