Edited by Antara Joshi
Now that I’m doing better, I can shamelessly reveal all the things I did to soothe myself.
I would shove my body out of my room. I would decide to go to the bleachers and watch the sunset. I would put my headphones on and play music loud enough to block anyone who might stop me to have a conversation. I would dig up playlists that I made when I was thirteen and listen to music I had not listened to in years. I would sit by myself opposite the football field and cry. Sometimes this would help, sometimes it would not. I would take a long, drawn-out walk back to my room. I would look at old pictures on my laptop and smile or cry some more. I would scroll and scroll through endless pictures— all taken at the exact right moment, just after I had wiped my tears and started smiling, or just before I looked at some hurtful text on my phone. I would come across a few rare pictures too, ones taken at the wrong moments, the ugly ones— where my smile is crooked or where I look crestfallen after an exam. The loud music would always be there. Sometimes even the music would not help and I would pull out a cigarette from my drawer, put it to my mouth and blow smoke out of my window. I would find different, painful, voluntary things to mix into my bloodstream just to distract from the involuntary pain.
Sometimes, nothing else helped but letting myself bleed. Of course, I had to bleed. I had to bleed so I wouldn’t die. I had to bleed so that I would have a chance to recover and live. I let myself bleed for as long as my body held the pain you left behind. Blood cells renew every 120 days. I let myself bleed for 120 days and at the end of it, my body holds new cells that don’t hold pain reminiscent of you.
Now that I’m doing better, I can shamelessly reveal that I had always really, really wanted a friend who was also a lover.
And you slipped so perfectly into that role. Of course, this is about you, as is most of my writing in some way. The love is lost but the grief still gives me poetry every now and then. I wanted to spend so many more sunrises sitting on the terrace in silence, sometimes sharing a cigarette, sometimes sharing a kiss. I wanted someone who would work on assignments with me when I felt stuck and would come with me on a walk afterwards. Even if it was 4 AM. I wanted someone who I could talk to about other lovers and who would talk to me about other lovers, and someone I could then become a lover for occasionally. I wanted the constancy within the fluidity and I wanted the romance within the friendship. Of course, this is about you. Everything was about you— no, everything was about the eventual loss of you.
Until it wasn’t.
I found a lover who was also a friend, this time. This love holds multitudes within it in a way I did not know the romantic kind ever could. Maybe I’ve never known true romance. Or maybe I’ve found exactly what I wanted, only in a different face, through a different path.Now that I’m doing better, I can shamelessly reveal all the things he does to soothe me.
I made a stupid, unfunny joke yesterday about how we are more plants than humans. He laughed at it and I laughed because he laughs at all my unfunny jokes and makes even stupider ones. I was craving candy in the middle of a lecture, and he walked to my classroom to give it to me. I have replaced the loud music with the sound of his breathing. I still cry at the bleachers on those few bad days, but I’m no longer alone. My most vivid memory is no longer the one where I split open my skin; it is the one where I’m half-asleep and he is pulling the blanket over me. I have now known him for a year and then some; yet, I cannot remember going a day without him expressing his love for me (because wasn’t it supposed to wear out by now?). There is a long, long prose about you in the depths of my blog— some 5000 words written through blurry vision in two hours, some months ago. He found it, read it, and hugged me for two minutes straight when he saw me next and I thought, oh, love is back, love is here. Love stands at the same door threshold it had once crossed to leave. It had seemed then that it was leaving forever and taking the greatest friendship of my life to the grave too. Love is back, so much grander and it has brought friendship with it.