Some years on

I do not love you except…

…because I love you, she completed the line.

I go from loving to not loving you
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire

Her lips moved silently as she mouthed the words along with the speaker. There was a reading going on at her favourite bookstore by an author of some repute, and he was quoting this poem in some context.

Ten years on, she could still quote Neruda with the same ease as she did at eighteen. Never mind that she hadn’t touched a tome of poetry for more than five years. Back then, it was the elusiveness of the meaning that fascinated her. As did the man’s ability to seemingly wrench out a plethora of emotions from the core of his being. The rhythm, the words, the endless contradictions woven together seamlessly…. She could never get enough of it.

A wry smile touched the corners of her mouth. A few years ago, the elusive meaning had finally presented itself…..only too clearly. The contradictions didn’t puzzle her any more. The wisdom that comes with age, she thought wryly. Only that she hadn’t bargained for that much pain to colour the process of understanding.

She rarely took out that box of sepia memories in her mind. Endless walks, endless conversations, discussing poetry, swapping favourite books, sharing ten minutes over a hurried coffee. She marvelled at how some recollections could still make her smile despite the searing hurt that would inevitably follow. How they stayed up talking the whole night beside a dying bonfire during the batch tour. The knowing smiles on her friends’ faces when she told them of that conversation. You only talked? Giggles had followed.

They would never understand. Never could. That just a smile, the way his hand held hers, the pleasing lilt of his voice…. They were enough to make her feel complete and loved like never before. That she had been accepted as she was, with no expectations. That the two of them had placed a meeting of minds above all else. They were an atypical teenage couple.

But they had split five years later in typical teenage fashion, despite pushing their mid twenties then. Pride, and a refusal to accept that each had wronged the other. A reluctance to apologize, an unwillingness to appear pliant. Accepting it now isn't going to help any.

A mental shoulder shrug.

She moved on to the next bookshelf, another bookworm on a late afternoon tryst with her best friends.


In this part of the story I’m the one who dies
The only one
And I will die of love because I love you

She was willing to bet that the Romance section didn’t have a story like hers. One without a happy ending.

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Purple dusk deepened to inky blackness as he watched from his apartment window. A sense of loneliness, his constant companion these days, hovered around all he did. Life didn't have to be like this, he reminded himself. Retrospection made it very easy to acknowledge his mistakes, and recall that he’d had a chance to remedy their rift.

Had.

He would live the rest of his life knowing that he was the biggest fool on earth to have turned away the one person who saw him exactly as he was. Accepted him that way. And loved him for it.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight
To think I don’t have her. To feel I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

Not bad. He could still recall the ‘Saddest Poem’ as Neruda called it. And he could still picture the rapture on her face when she heard it for the first time. From him.

He turned away from the window, a smile on his face. Hurt yet amused. Silently acknowledging that he would carry this burden everywhere. That at the end of it all, he’d have his own epic poem, and nobody to recite it to. That he did not really want to tell it to anybody but her.

Perhaps, he mused, the embers wouldn‘t come to life even if he ran into her again. They had half a decade, a couple of countries, and a distance like several oceans between their minds to contend with.

Perhaps.


I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her
Love is short and oblivion so long

The buzz of a suburban evening bored into his consciousness, as he settled into his couch for another routine evening of TV, newspapers and retrospection.

Perfectly worded, as always, he mused. Chances are, Neruda was once a bigger fool than I was

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