Lately,Love

By Adithi Vijaya Kumar

I should have loved you twenty years later. When you’d read often and go golfing on the weekends. You would come home late from work and still help the kids with their homework, patiently reading aloud from the textbook and being twice as confused. Nothing would bring you more joy than the evening news with cheap soda and rant about how these politicians don’t care. I’d listen and argue that you said the same thing every day, and we’d have dinner on the huge table we bought at that rusty antiques store. The inside jokes would flow quicker than the wine, and the sleepy i-love-you’s would mark the end of our day. I wouldn’t complain about the snoring, because all I ever do is dream.

Uncertainty and conflicts are two things I can’t handle but I’m working on it. When I told you I loved you and you said you didn’t know how you felt, it hurt. The conversations and feelings meant nothing without the commitment. I was your pastime and you were my fantasy. You may have certainly fallen for me, but you never embraced it the way I did. I was proud to be entirely consumed by your presence and be dizzyingly intoxicated with every one of your words. While you on the other hand saw me as a circus animal. So amused, yet pitifully disgusted with my little tricks. 

I still can’t discern how deep my feelings ran. Things reminded me of you and I kept rooting for you. I made a conscious choice every day to keep you in my heart and cherish the memories of us. I loved you, but you just fell in love. You may have thought of me and liked me but that was absent in your actions, and forever will be. The tension is unshakeable between two people who never really loved and still lost.

I am so deeply fascinated by the idea of choice. The idiosyncrasy behind a decision, runs often on someone’s intuition, typically influenced by their past. I psycho-analyzed everything you said, overthought until I was physically sick, replayed conversations until my mind blurred the line between real and imagination. I had convinced myself you were a good person because I was the one acting crazy. You considered my vulnerability a slip up in your perfect image of me I bled to craft. 

Your hesitance was a no but mine was fear. I was too deeply infatuated with you to ever expect to receive. I poured from an empty cup into a shattered glass, then I wondered where all my love went. Love can be rollercoaster, but the ride has to end at some point, which for us never did. We could never reach that point of true honesty, and my straightforwardness always felt like a threat to you. Assertiveness would always be crazy to you because you only liked jokes, about how little all of this mattered and that you were beyond this.

But did I ever stand a chance? To someone who hated themself and still never tried, I couldn’t fix you. An immature, narrow minded guy like you couldn’t become the man of my dreams, shocker! I don’t regret that I went above and beyond for you because I’m not ashamed of myself anymore. I’ve grown to love much more of myself and am getting better at confrontation, you’re not worth it however. So, this isn’t an elegy to an improbable love, but a love letter to myself. From having the courage to speak up, put myself out there and become more focused on my dreams, I’m grateful to myself for letting go of my insecurity and realizing my self-worth.

By Adithi Vijaya Kumar