On Long-Distance and the Pain of a Love That Could Have Been

Troubles change you.

What is love if it cannot hold on to being itself in times of adversity?

We do not know how our fates can change in the snap of two fingers giving authority, the seal on a passport inking 'yes' to the question of will you take me in if I leave it all behind? On an evening that rolled too soon into night I took a picture of you and your face was blurred into the backdrop of the watching moon till I could not tell which was whom and at one point it was almost your head, detached, that bobbed white and cold like a stray balloon I'd let go in the inky black sky. You had a pimple on your face from the stress and you'd shaved your stubble off clean, to be 'more presentable' you said, and I hated it. Would you wait for me, you asked and for the first of many times to come I felt my heart smoulder and turn black with the devastation of pain. I hated every minute of it, but my lips were like clams and clasped tight over the invisible pearl I held on my mute tongue and rolled over and over in silence, don't go. I don't think I can, don't go. But have it here or to go?, the visa officer asked, and you answered, to go.

Sometimes I look back and I think, how could it have been? We walked in moonlight and under the blackness of a velvet sky you pulled me in and kissed me as if earth and sky had merged in one. The honeymoon phase they said, the rose-tinted days. Back then we would meet, you under that spreading tree on the side of the road, and each time you looked at me the first time I emerged from the turn of the corner; I felt beautiful, reflected in your eyes. To love was a medley back then, an age of innocence where leaves showered raindrops and fireworks burst like stars the first night you got down before me on your knees, and the universe seemed whole again, just to see two souls at peace. We walked under trees spreading their branches in a tangled web to carry the weight of falling skies so they wouldn't crash down on our heads. But our eyes were misted with stardust and tears and we didn't see, didn't know that the skies had already started falling. The cogs had started working, turning the wheels that would send the clouds descending like water-weighted fleece until they covered our mouths in damp cotton and we would thrash and flail for air.

But we were not so much younger then than we are now, are we? Have we aged so much in the space of not even two years that we can cast a glance over our shoulder at those times and think of them as "those days when we were young?" True, your hair sprouted silver before mine (that first hair is still stuck between quiet yellow pages that keep their secrets) and now four- four!- white hairs have grown on my head like thin wisps of fog trapped within the black night. And under the skin of my cheeks the faint lines of weariness and age are working; I will have wrinkles of my own before long. :)

There are some that can stand the distance and carry on with the everyday with no terrible pain gnawing away like a sharp-teethed mouse at their heart. In writing I remember the punishments of the olden days, the iron bucket with the mice trapped in placed over the heart and the fire heating it slowly from the bottom. In their terror of the burning heat, skipping over white-hot metal, the mice eat away through the chest in a frantic bid to escape, and ultimately through the human heart. Would you understand the pain if I speak to you in images you've witnessed in your favourite TV shows? Some can submerge, suppress and move on. But some loves are too deep, too hard, and distance chips away at each vulnerable edge of the soul. Heart-strings stretch, you say, but they strain and strain to the point of breaking, and then- suddenly- snap. And one day you wake, and you do not love, anymore.


It was the fear of stopping loving you that drove me wild.


Ages ago, I wrote to you that, love morphs. It does. But do you stay the same? You morph too, and I. In another land, you worry your brain to make ends meet and here, in the same where you left me I burn my heart black with the terror that something brilliant, where I saw blue-white diamond flash, turns to be naught but rough coal in the endless drudging mine of life after all.