Kintsugi

It doesn’t take much to fall in love with someone.

Sometimes it takes a night of intimacy that leaves you wanting to wake up to them forever.

Sometimes, it takes lying in their arms on a lazy Sunday afternoon while watching the rains fall.

Sometimes, it takes dancing with them amongst people, aware of their gaze on you, on every move you make.

Sometimes, it takes evenings spent walking with your hand held, with fleeting kisses in the shadows.

Sometimes, it takes countless conversations over several months, turning curiosity and interest in adoration.

It doesn’t take much for you to carve a space for their warmth, for their company.

So you begin to pine. For tenderness, for the haven that allows you to be vulnerable, even if it were but an occasional grace.

And you remember. You remember every moment with every fibre of your being. You remember so much, your heart aches.

For it doesn’t take much to fall out of love with someone.

Sometimes, it takes being issued an ultimatum to stay or walk away from them.

Sometimes, it takes being left agape when you tentatively reach out for a kiss.

Sometimes, it takes being conveniently ignored.

Sometimes, it takes having your time and attention trifled with.

And so, with each failed attempt, you approach the next with even less to lose. With each occasion of having your needs denied, of having affection accorded to you in fits and snatches, you pull up the walls even higher.  

You are forever mourning the lack of foresight, the ease with which you give in each time. You are forever grieving the years you keep losing to being hung up over them, chasing them, crying over them.

Until the tables turn and affection comes your way when you least expect it, when you have long given up on the hope of it ever materialising.

But you find yourself cold in the very arms you once sought refuge in. You find no comfort in being embraced, your heart remains still, hardened to the core despite being caressed and kissed in the gentlest of ways. You are no longer moved by the tremble in their voice, the sighs punctuating each pregnant pause, the barely concealed undercurrent of pain that flashes through every now and then.

You could not care less, it would seem.

Too little, too late is perhaps an apt, wise adage, after all.

However you can’t help but ask: what does it take to fall in love with someone yet again?

Does it mean salvaging a bridge from being burnt to ashes? Does it mean refilling and repairing the cracks that snake down to the very foundation?

And, perhaps most importantly, does it mean according a chance at redemption even if those questions continue to remain unanswered?

Verba Volant, Scripta Manent

I write letters – it’s what I do. Writing to someone is an act of love for me, and having others write to me was, and continues to be, a source of great comfort and joy.  

However, it has been a while…a really, really long while since I could bring myself to willingly pick up the pen and write – whether it’d be for the sake of my oft-forsaken introspection, the occasional birthday letters or, for that matter, the rare piece of prose.

For words once written read the same regardless of the time that may have passed. Words that mean something, at least at the time of being written, and it is not difficult to fool oneself into believing that they continue to mean something irrespective of the context leading up to it and thereafter.

As it stands, what had once been a source of great comfort was now a mockery of the very things it represented. My much treasured collection of postcards and letters, instead of standing testament to the fact that I was once loved and cherished, were now reduced to bitter reminders of what I once had and subsequently lost.

It was as if the written word had stopped being my love language.

However, things do find a way of coming back to you. I’d have the occasional friend sending me pictures of notes I’d written to them long ago. They were reminders, as sporadic as they might be, of the fact that perhaps, my words did mean something to others, if not in the same capacity as they meant to me. 

Yet the reminders coalesced into a singular, definite realisation only when one day, a dear friend happened to ask me if I still had the letter she had written to me by way of farewell, when she was in her final year at our college. 

While I looked for that specific letter (so that she could have a picture of it as well), I wound up leafing through my collection once again. I was steeling myself for feeling that familiar anguish that I’d come to associate with all those words, but her letter served to remind me instead of my capacity for love and kindness. That I mattered enough for her, and in hindsight, all those others who wrote to me, to earnestly endeavour towards penning it down. 

And here is why I finally found myself willing to pick up the pen after all. For time will pass, people will change and move on, but their words remain  unchanging, indelibly printed onto the parchment of  their time, their relationships with us. And we write, not in order to be remembered in perpetuity, but to leave behind testaments to our best selves. For others to remember us by, even if they have little else to go on with. 

And so I shall write. So that I may be remembered, fondly, lovingly, as I remember the others.