While you are away.

I was just thinking. Actually I was trying not to think but could not dodge the thought. You and I spent 5 whole years apart. I spent the first two years dying every day. You don't know what it was like. I have tears in my eyes writing about it right now. Every.Single.Time. 

And no, it is not because I cry easy otherwise. The only time tears well up like this at the mention of something is N getting ill. Anywho, we spent all that time apart. As apart as can be. Usually people drift off. We did not it. I did not. A part of me would not budge. The pain was so much at one point of time I felt dying would be easier and would make more sense. The pain was so much at another point of time I felt perhaps our apart was not 'meant' to be. It was an epiphany. In pain. The epiphany told me that perhaps there was some cosmic equation that did not quite add up, some providential circuit that had got disrupted. So strong was this instinct that I paid heed to it and called you once around Christmas. To tell you what that pain was doing to me. 

How it was changing who I was. As if I had disturbed a whole butterfly-effect thing. Touched what was not to be touched, something sacred and the dominos lined up started to fall, like a fort of sand. 

Invariably I tried to put an end to it. In having you I was unfulfilled. In leaving you I was miserable. I chose to leave to allow both of us a better chance at love. 

I don't write like a lover here. It is not impossible to leave someone, I know. I had left someone before I met you and I have left someone after you. I have parted and been in pain but it was bearable. But our parting changed me forever. I had touched the outer limits to how much a human being could endure, or so it felt to me. 

If you asked me what it was that caused the pain- if I missed going out with you, being with you, hanging out together - I would not know what to say. I was not dying to meet you. I was not dying to hang out. I would have been able to meet had I really wanted to. I was not a drug addict but my withdrawal was the same if not worse. I was miserable like one would be without  oxygen. Like a fish would struggle with water only enough to wet its gills but not enough to allow her to remain submerged in water. I did not have a clue why this was happening to me.

With time I learned the tricks. And I buried all of 'it' somewhere. Knowing I was never to return. Knowing that this would happen only once in my lifetime. 

---

In missing you like any partner would since you are away, I am thinking of those 5 years. And I am thinking of this one week. And I'm scared for myself. I am scared that so many years ago I could feel that epiphany, that cosmic thing. And here we are, together. That I was right in sensing all that even though I could not decipher it at the time. But it turned out to be true. 

How strange that we once spent 5 years apart and this one week has been difficult for me. Why am I like this? Why can't be more 'normal'. Why feel so many feels. 

This is not a love letter. This is more like how Neil Armstrong must have felt seeing the galaxies fromthe outer  space for the first time. Thousands of stars and the planets glittering against a colourless universe, traversing their path. The awe. The beauty. The infinite mystery. And the fear of being so lonely even when you have conquered the universe.

Neha