I know what I’m going to say is a lie but I want to hurt her, see her cry. The alternative to healing is, maybe, to hurt the other equally. When love leaves, what do you fill that hole with? What emotion is strong enough? Revenge.
‘I regret the moment I met you. I would do anything to forget you and everything about you. If I could, I would burn every reminder of your existence from my life.’
She stiffens. And with a casual dismissive flick of her wrist, she says, ‘Fine, then just go to jail. Then you will certainly remember me.’
‘What part of I hate everything about you don’t you get, Aanchal?’
‘The part where what happened wasn’t my fault.’
‘How can you be so fucking dense? You broke my heart...’
My voice cracks and trails. I can feel my heart pounding in my ears. I am choking on my own breath.
‘... you were all I wanted, Aanchal. Everything I needed in my life you just took away. You just fucking had to ruin everything, didn’t you?’
She exhales long and wearily. As if it’s me who ripped her soul apart and shattered her spirit.
‘It’s been three years, Daksh.’
‘And yet it feels like my wound is as fresh as yesterday,’ I grumble, teeth gritting, ‘rotting and eating everything inside of me. You left me a shell of who I was, Aanchal.’
‘It was just a month, Daksh,’ she insists, her voice now slowly rising.
I want to check out of this conversation as soon as possible.
She speaks again, ‘It was just a month! And how you’re feeling about it now is not my problem.’
I force back my sadness as I had promised myself I would if I saw her again.
‘Firstly, it was forty-three days. And if I could string together the fragments of happiness I felt in those forty-three days, they look like an eternity to me. So don’t tell me that our love was governed by fucking time.’
I have imagined this conversation numerous times over the last three years, tinkering with the little details, the timing of it, the venue, and the words I would use to tell her that I hated her. I didn’t know until this moment that I wouldn’t stop loving her. But this, what I feel right now, is not love. How can love be this corrosive? This is what it feels like when your idea of love is shattered. This is the absence of hope. This is what was once love.
The sight of her is still painful, like all beautiful things are.
‘We wanted different things,’ she says, bringing all the hurt back instantly.
I shake my head. We didn’t want different things. Her decision was based on what she wanted. There was no discussion, no chance of a compromise. She was a boulder rolling down a hill and she crushed me. I was supposed to just say yes, that’s it.
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Daksh,’ she says, her voice serious. ‘I had just broken up with Vicky. I was just coming out of a four-year-old relationship which was just... toxic. You can’t even imagine what I went through.’
‘With a guy you shouldn’t have been with in the first place,’ I argue, though it’s not much of an argument. She had gotten into that relationship when she was seventeen or so, so there was little chance that she had made the right decision.
‘I needed time,’ she insists. ‘I couldn’t get into something so quickly. Didn’t I have the right to freak out?’
I feel all my wounds slowly reopen.
‘And I clearly told you that I would be there every step of the way,’ I remind her. ‘Did I or did I not tell you? I begged and fell at your feet to give us a chance and you just... I had been in love with you for years...’
I was eighteen when I’d first met her in a resort in the Andamans where both of us were with our families on a holiday. She was dating Vicky, who later turned out to be abusive and controlling, and I was dating Sameeksha, who judged rightly that I was a wayward guy with no plans for the future, no drive, and ghosted me. But I remember the first time I saw Aanchal. I was completely and utterly smitten. Her face was a work of art, pure perfection, I thought at the time. Her face reminded me of an article I once read, which said the right ratios, angles and mathematics are what make beautiful people, beautiful. Iimagined her God and creator immersed in their art, carving out her bones, slicing her skin. His palette crowded with bloody scalpels, torn veins, skin drafts; his mind obsessed dangerously with getting those ratios right to the point of madness. Her face sliced and sewn to reach perfection. I remember noticing that she was 5’6”, slender and had a heart-shaped face that ended in a sharp chin. A slight shadow of acne on her face only heightened her beauty. Her lips were full and chapped and every time I saw her, she had been making them worse by touching them. I knew at that precise moment what this warm, gooey feeling in the pit of my stomach was. This feeling of wanting to out-focus everything but that face. I had a crush on her. Would I have stayed in touch after we left the resort if she didn’t have a boyfriend? Absolutely. Later, fate put her in my path. Had she not shown in my ‘People you might know’ on LinkedIn, I might even have forgotten her face.
That face never left my search history.
Little did I know that every time I typed ‘Aanchal Madan’ in the search bar of LinkedIn, I was falling in love with her. Four years later, we bumped into each other in Mumbai, fell in love properly, or whatever that was, and she broke my heart.
‘... and you trampled on all of it, Aanchal. Just like that,’ I say.
