10 random things about me and love I insist on telling you
1. When I met J, I was already with G. When I met G on my second day of college, I was seeing S. When I met S with the help of a cousin, I was with K. When K met me in Math class, I was fourteen. You walk towards the light, you walk into darkness, either way you are blinded.
2. One of the above-mentioned letters wanted to slap me in public for leaving him. He hatched a plot to get me to meet him in a place crowded by our peers and involve me in a loud row and slap me across the face, to let the world know I had hurt him. Sometimes, I wish I would have let him. I broke his heart and I remember that I did this.
3. There are two novels you will never understand fully, unless you have loved and lost the one person who made you believe in soul mate, or even soul for that matter. Devdas and Wuthering Heights.I unfortunately, wholly, completely understand both.
4. To this day, I regret refusing to kiss my fifteen-year-old first love. In a span of five minutes, he first mocked me, then looked amused and then moved to irreversible and total indifference.
5. When I was 17, G sat next to me under a tree in the rain and said, “You look so beautiful.” It was like he had complimented me into a coma. Not only did I not look at him and speak to him, I disbelieved him. I remember looking down at my muddy feet, shabby sandals and focusing on a tiny scab on my big toe and thinking, “I hate him so much for making me feel so ugly.” You gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
6. In my life, I have learnt the hard way, that when you are trying to run away from someone and that someone clings on to you— not just that he holds on, but tries to hold you back with anger and love and resentment and love and spite and love, clings on so hard that he has his feet dug into the ground and his nails are clawing into your flesh— don’t leave.If you want to cling on to someone who is leaving you with your teeth and nails, don’t. They will leave.
7. “ I want to see you happy”…… “Actually, no. I don’t want to see you happy with someone else. I hope you are never happy. I hope you are never well.”I know love is not wanting your loved one to be in pain. But I also know this is nothing but love. Flawed, selfish, human kind of love.
8. I have barely ever had intense romance with anyone other than G. But if you rock the boat too much, even if you don’t fall out, you will get nauseous. I got positively sick. So I decided never to love anyone like a crucifix. I was not being stubborn or careful. I was just being curious.
One night when I got home from work, J and I sat on our beds, silently. The music was on, I was reading, he was playing a violent video game. We had a box of chocolates on the bed. Each of us silently ate one piece at a time, without looking at each other or talking. Slowly it became painfully sweet but we were being so greedy. The need to put one more piece into the mouth became more and more urgent. I don’t know when we both passed out from the chocolate. Through the whole thing, we had not spoken one word to each other. I cannot imagine one other person who I would do this with— abandon control, be nakedly greedy, be sloth, be gluttonous, be completely unmindful of the self—except for my husband, J. I have since abandoned my curiosity.
9. At parties or social gatherings, I sometimes try to make up for my skin and hair, back fat and belly fat with cutting wit and sarcasm. Mostly it works. If I really want to, I can shine and glitter, sending the hottest girl at the club crying to the loo. My eyes twinkle and I become a whole new me. Then I look across the room and I see J thinking, this is not really her. This one quizzical look, the knowledge that he knows who you really are, is being in an intimate relationship in my book.
10. Pick out a scar and explain how you got it. It’s a game I only play with the man I love.
