A letter I cannot write

 

          I was making my mental list of 'the pros and cons of writing to you' when this quote popped up on my wallpaper's widget.

"Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength"  

                                                                         ~Sigmund Freud 

This had almost started weighing the pros on the heavier side, despite the list consisting of just one bullet; writing to you would relieve me of all thoughts of writing to you. 

It has been three years since I last saw you. Overly dressed on an early winter evening, catching up with me on our way to the restaurant, sweating from the same heat you had brought for me. I wish I knew then that it was the first and the last time our arms brushed against each other in the chilled walk on those lanes. We were close enough to be drawn into each other the first and the last time. 

 They say when the wait is too long, lovers lose their desires. This is not the worst that can happen until one of them doesn't. 

At the beginning of our separation, I did play Frida Kahlo, passionately writing for her Diego, burning in love, bursting with colors, reminiscing a poignant union that she has not had yet. With the headlong passage of time, which doesn't care about our preferences, needs, and destinies, I have started losing my metaphors. 

 I have written so much ever since. A lot of it expresses the frustration of being able to make moves on you only in the words I choose and the punctuation I use. I have poured in too much that they have lost their power to seduce you irrespective of their breed, arrangement, temperament, and training. Cordelia says that I vomit over emails when I feel sick. Ironically, I find that a beautiful metaphor for my ugly rants. I am always sick without you anyways. Separation maddens me and I am not the poet between us. You are.

I remember sporting the word 'narcissist' for you. Ironically, I have been writing for me and about me in my letters for so long. Writing letters is both my forte and frailty. My first letter was written when I was 5, a one-liner complaint about my brother addressed to my mother. Growing up, I learned about all the great things that can be achieved through letters. I learned about a letter that prompted Lincoln to grow a beard, letters of Martin Luther King from Birmingham appealing for 'justice everywhere', the entire body of Gandhian philosophy contained in the letters to an assumed journalist in 'Hind Swaraj', Nehru fathering his 10-year-old daughter Indira from Naini Jail, exchanges of US and Soviet preventing war and many more letters which altered history in one way or other. I remember shrugging off whenever you accused me of being in love with the idea of love but then I wanted to die the death of Leonard Cohen not much after writing to you, my Marianne. Maybe my letters have been expressing my romanticization of writing to you rather than my love and longing for you. 

 I am not a lawless ungoverned beloved anymore. I am imprisoned for the same reason that I was one. I want to discuss the world with you, the same world you wanted us to be against and defy, and yet the one you serve. The one I am destined to serve too. The 'freedom struggle' Nehru would mention in his letters was that of nations and never his own. We both have already chosen our chains, but I need your counsel, criticism, assistance, and the notes you made navigating your way in and out of these cages before me. I need to be written to which is all I really say when I write to you. 

I too am as upset as much as you are at my younger (and now when I look back, older) self who did not listen to you. The one with Ifs and buts, 'no's and never, arsenals and jibes. Indeed, I don't deserve to be written back. However, I wonder if you have the time and space to do that. I wonder if you still write poems in your diary; what kind of book catches your eye these days; if you watched The Top Gun Maverick sequel; if you are missing riverbanks and forests or relishing them, and then out of all the things you love and take pleasure in, what taste an unsolicited letter from a distant lover would leave you with?

I wish I had known your previous love stories and all you did in them. Were you wooed or proposed to your partner, did you have to wait for her as much as I must, were you wise enough to let go of the difficult stories (and should I do that too?) or fought for the one you believed in, did your heart long for her in the past and does it long for me the same way now? Have I been replaced by another lover, partner, friend, guide, or some project? 

I wish I could create the same mystery around myself. The epiphanies of your lingering words do not allow that. Every keyword you ever used rings like a sweet alarm tone. There was nothing special about the plateau of Tibet, the lives of lamas, the disappeared river Saraswati, the entire landscape of the northeast, the lanes of Delhi, Michelle Tanner's show, and BodhitreeXL band, for me, otherwise. 

Writing to you clarifies my thoughts but leaves you with a false illusion of predictability of my being.  

Although I yearn to tell you that I am completely disarmed, that I wish to accept your subjugation leaving all my conditions, and that I want to surrender in the strife and be vanquished by you without complaints, I never do and I cannot. You deserve to be won over again and again and I to be tested on fire. I must pierce the several eyes of thousands and thousands of fishes swimming around me, I must lift heavy bows every day, and I must choose the right caskets at every turn of Shakespearean plots. The promises must be protected with the entirety of my being because I owe you everything you have been, are, and will be. I am drowning in your debt and writing to you is begging for a waiver.

The cons have plummeted the scale, and my vulnerabilities have found their strength; thus, this is a letter I cannot write to you.

A girl hiding a bouquet of blue flowers in her dungaree
(Image generated through AI, Microsoft Bing)