Eternally In Love That Is Neither A Claim Nor A Construct

“…please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”

—Sylvia Plath

Winter of 2015. It was the first night in the house alone. Once a shared space of togetherness. We had agreed to part ways. I was numb. Sleep was elusive. The silence of the winter night resounded the silent tears rolling down my cheeks, building up into an uncontrollable sob. I tried to unjumble all I was feeling in the red diary that lay by the bed. Words failed to pour out the weight of my heart in black and white. I cried myself to sleep. It was a long night—the first of many that would follow.

The morning sun was bright. I woke up, ambling around the house scanning for the remains and the traces of another and of what was. The house was half-abandoned. Drawers had been emptied. His books from the shelf, his clothes from the cupboard. Our memories from here on were divided. All packed to move.

I turned to the terrace. The yellow chairs were gone too. He had said, “This will be a reminder of the colour that you are. I am black and white.” The chairs held memories of mundane everyday mornings—our morning chai that he would make, of sipping in silence, of things we said.

Before long, I fell into a howling stupor. Plonked on the heap of brown cartons to pack what remained.

For the six months that followed, I slept on my red couch in the living room. I had abandoned my bedroom. It was an in-between place. The house became a space I escaped. I would aimlessly drive around. Blaring songs of love and loss, blurry eyed with bleeding tears, drowning in the sound of the music and the whirring engine. Even in the house of bleakness, the lingering fragrance of flowers remained. I continued to buy white fragrance for myself.

Our separation was not the act of falling out of love. Sometimes love is not enough and affection cannot hold together the cohabitation. Sometimes reasons don’t rationalise. I didn’t quite know what was happening. I wonder, did I know what love really was? We called each other every morning for a while till we thought we needed assurance that we would be fine and stopped when we garnered the courage to build our own nests apart from the other.

When I started to write this piece, I called him. Memory alters and resides in our narratives differently sometimes. And sometimes we must factcheck to just arrive at a common recall. Of the yellow chairs and what we took away and what we left behind. Metaphorically too.

The lesson in understanding love was just the beginning for me. I can say that it emerged in the process and the processing of the loss—fumbling, forming and finding my own self. Not in regret. Not in wanting to return. Love is in becoming who we are. The meaning, the metaphor and then the encounter with those we choose to love.

***

Last day of the year 2015. Two women in their favourite café ready to bury the year of breaking hearts. It was midnight. We continued talking some more about love.

“I am a seeker of love,” I said.

“Be the lover,” she said.

“I like this state of being,” I said.

“Free as a bird,” she whispered.

She spoke of the intolerable state of the belo­ved citing what Carson McCullers once wrote.

I went back to Toni Morrison in unison.

“Love is never any better than the lover. Something that is loved is never lost. To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”

Two friends walked out that night—free. Free of the burden of the year gone by and ready to embrace the new year.

The two of us had first met in the summer of 2015—from the same school, same city and carrying a clutch of shared memories. She said, “Why don’t you come by?”

Many evenings that followed—we read poetry and prose to each other and to ourselves. Odes to love and experiences of loss shared by many before us, real and fictional, offered solace and lightness of being. When I cried, she would cook food and offer me Rooh Afza (refresher of the soul).

“You must hydrate,” she would announce.

Here we were, at the same café that held the stories of our many evenings. The café was a witness too. Both the friendship and the café were witness to my breaking and becoming in the year that was.

***

Summer of 2016. We continued to read out poems to each other. We were real people. We were old-world nostalgists. In the modern age of mediated love and many options, we would not shop for love online, we vowed. Until we decided to swipe. She went there for a story and I joined to compare notes and experiences. After all, it was all for the story. We were the ‘true lovers’, swiping didn’t spell soul mates. We went left, we went right. “Take it all out on the patriarchy. Reform them, have a discourse with them, dismiss them at will,” I said.

As they say, never say never. Vows are broken.

***

Love struck again. I found it in the oddest marketplace, a place we had vowed was not for true lovers. He read books, read out poems in his baritone, scribbled in the air in silence. That’s when I first noticed his beautiful hands. He to me was old-world charm. Considerably younger in years. But love knows no barriers. It just flows. I was ready to love. I had it all figured out. What could possibly go wrong?

Four years went by. I was turning an optimist. I was perpetually in the state of love. It was a perfect,  idyllic place. Until the winter of 2020. The message popped up: “Would you consider marriage?” he wrote. This was never on the cards nor was I a seeker of validating milestones. I was an ideal aberration to the normative needs—many years older, separated—enough to strip me of all other ‘qualifying’ meters: my individuality, my sense of being.

He realised it soon. This had to end too.

I was for free-flowing, all-consuming love, not bound by the rules defined by others.

2021 was the year of longest, seemingly unending mourning. The year of breaking yet again. I also knew that in breaking, I would find myself again. I did. The many nights and days of gut-wrenching, heart-crushing pain. It was all familiar by now. This time I didn’t abandon my bedroom. I stayed put. The red couch was replaced with green. I continued to buy flowers. Plants on my terrace were not deserted. I had brought back the yellow chairs. I started ambling around the house again. In search of signs. There were many strewn around in my everydayness.

One morning while arranging my books, I found an old, crinkled envelope with dried petals and a note written in a fine hand: ‘‘To the purity I know, withstanding the harsh. Stay as you are.”

The note was signed off—Yours.

I stared for long at—Yours.

The same day I found a poster rolled up in a basket. A birthday gift from a year ago. It was a  hand-painted Cohen one with words etched in calligraphic curve—‘‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I had waited long to frame it. Maybe it was a sign. All the metaphors coming from lost fragments were reappearing as a reminder.

He has moved to his hometown. We meet occasionally when he comes to Delhi. He brings me plants. The champa continues to blossom among the greens on my terrace.

Love, I knew by now, flows without restraint in freedom. It is not a possession, a claim or a construct.

***

“With me the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. It is like quicksand.”– Sylvia Plath

The year 2022. The onset of autumn. Patterns are breaking. So is the season of beginning. In the ‘here and now’, I choose the beauty of being in my proclamation of love.

“Be the lover,” she said that night. I remember.

I have been escaping rigid constructs. He does not want to be held either.

That’s where it starts. Yet again.

I was intuitively gravitating to this new unknown. I was curious. I had by then read most of his writing that I could find.

We met. I notice he does not make eye contact. ‘‘I find eyes intimidating,” he says. His forehead creases in a frown when he looks away in sile­nce. In that moment, I notice his beautiful artistic hands. I smile to myself.

A few months less than a year later. I see him as he is. An endearing beautiful whole. I still look for him in written words and find him in his silence too. In his playful banter to the deepest chats. In our long drives, our unplanned travels. In the ease to the impulsive surge. In waiting to awaited meeting. To the peaceful in the tumult. To being a co-traveller. I love water, he likes mountains. We travel to a place where the two merge.

I scribbled these lines in my notes to self. It was after one of our initial meetings.

I return to them again this evening.

“Like the undulating waves, the rhythmic rise

’Tis a journey of ebb and tide and  serenity inside

An ode to the sea and them, the sea bound

Little did I know the unknown that was to befall

My beating heart in a silent resound.

Is leaping beyond its bounds.”

I want to hold on to the here and now. The moments in the making.

Morii (n): a desire to capture the fleeting moment. This word, a recent find. It is ‘shifting, flowing, melting’ anyway.

I keep our moments. You keep my love.

I continue to bring flowers home. I choose to be eternally in love.

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'Eternally in Love')

Pragya Vats is a campaign and communication specialist. She works with a leading Indian NGO