bittersweet valentine

does this meaningless meandering count as soft launch

12 Feb, 5:26 am

Leaving behind home, yet again. Unbrushed mouth and eyes heavy with a sleep that never quite arrives fully. The night sky turning bright—you can almost witness the darkness being sucked out of it. I can hear the faint, muffled sound of chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jaaye ham dono leaking through the headphones of the woman sitting beside me, which she must’ve forgotten to take out before surrendering to exhaustion. This is exactly what I find so lovely about travelling alone on trains. Thinking about my third-grade class teacher who used to be unusually nice to me. Heard from a junior that she’s forgetting everyday things and might quit teaching soon. As a kid, sometimes I liked to imagine that all of it was a bad dream, and that the sun might arrive wrapped in her palm and warm my blood again. That doesn’t work anymore.

13 Feb, 1:43 am

The cold, comforting sting of freshly changed sheets against my skin. The pale glow beside my bed the only thing illuminating the room. Spent more than an hour talking to friends about their old, fermented relationship drama. It fuels the cynicism, sure. But it also makes me awfully sad. The same thing always happens. We fall in love with the outline of a person and then resent them for what they could not become. You can only love silhouettes so much. We blame people for changing suddenly, but in all honesty, they were always changing—we just stood too close to witness it.

And isn’t most of love an attempt to escape the self? Two people running in opposite directions from themselves, colliding. A boy I came so close to loving wished I would cut myself open so he could slip inside. And why bother loving, then, if you’ll spend more time trying to forget? I’m not very good at either of those things. I fail as a lover, and then I fail at trying not to be one. Everything erodes except this stubborn, bitter love.

14 Feb, 7:35 pm

The white, unforgiving overhead fluorescent lights of the hospital waiting room. Plain beige walls that insist on making you taste the hopelessness of this place. Don’t ask me my V-Day plans. A middle-aged couple sitting a few chairs down, who had been talking in hushed voices, has fallen silent now. A look at them is all it takes to know they’ve cycled through the five stages of grief in the span of a day. The woman rests her head on the man’s shoulder, and they both shut their eyes. The tenderness of this simple act is enough to melt the glass walls surrounding my heart.

Truth is, when asked about past loves, I always talk about what went wrong—why it ended. I tell no one about how another’s hand kissed the soft of my palm when despair took me under. I pluck the petals of kindness and present only the thorned stem of mistakes and reason. Thinking I’m above love might spare my stupid heart the bruises it so readily collects, but it also keeps me from admitting that I find it so lovely to see humans latch onto one another and make some sense of reality when the world around us is an absolute shit show. And what is the alternative, anyway? To move through this life untouched, unheld, unmoved?

You orbited someone long enough to witness the loss of whatever bound you together. And yes, it ached so much when you fell apart—but your pain exists only as an affirmation of your love. All this bitterness because of all the love. And at the center of it all, a cocktail of emotions—

I wish we could’ve been better at loving each other. I wish I knew myself better at the time. Despite everything, I can’t bring myself to regret any of it. I hope you have an easier time falling asleep now.