25-05-2019,
Trivandrum.

My dearest Tara,

I saw your eyes today. Don’t ask me how. In them, was a sea of sorrows that you’ll never share with anyone. I am elated to see that you are with someone who can potentially make you happy. I sincerely hope that you are indeed happy! But to my mind’s compass which is painfully accurate at times, your eyes tell a different story.

I sometimes wonder of how we could be so close, yet so far away. It could very well be me hallucinating, but if we could have such powerful effect on eachother (not necessarily positive, as you have rightly inferred), is it wise to abandon each other? After all, what were the odds of us meeting and bringing about this tribulations unto ourselves? Maybe you are unperturbed, unlike me. But if my mind is to be at peace, I should write this letter to you. Ostensibly, a ‘love letter’ written by someone who is forever damned by this pestilence that is love.

People are asking of why I am writing so many love letters! I do this only because this is one thing that I do well. I write. And when I write, a strange connection forms between my heart’s broken chambers and my fingertips. Before my mind could make sense of the processes that lead to these words, they would be already smirking at me from the laptop screen. This is what writing does to me. Things are not much different even now.

Last two weeks have transformed me into a ghost of my former self. Even in this spiral of self destruction, writing is my sole solace. As I am writing this to you, the last sane bits of me are finding hope. They are optimistic that I may bounce back to my better state of mind. It may very well be an impossibility, but since I have seen harsher days, this may not be the end already.

My cupboard is overflowing with letters to you! I wrote a long letter each day for the last five days. Each word in those letters contain a bit of me. As the letters grew long, I started to fear if I may vanish by the time I finish them. I ran out ink more than once, so I had this vision that I am slowly letting myself dissolve in these letters. So even when I stopped writing and banished them to my cupboard, a suffocation overtook me. As I write, I can see the locked cupboard that contain my letters to you. Since those letters contain a part of me, this cupboard is making me claustrophobic. The smell of varnish is spurring a nostalgia that I left long ago in a wooden island that sank in an ocean of love long ago. That ocean of love which invaded my lungs, suffocated me to death and ripped me of my happiness for the longest time!

Tara, what have you done! Whatever we exchanged in the shortest time we had together was enough to undermine my constitution, this bubble of safety that I had built around me. That one day with you was enough to convince me that the loveless desert that I had created for myself was an illusion. That it was possible for me to love again and someone could reach out to me through all those miles of buffer that I kept from the “real” world. The very existence of a person like you was news to me! A pleasant news that shook me up from that slumber of complacence. I don’t know of when I started to feel this way. But ever since that day on the beaches, hospital and the highway, I started loving you. What happened afterwards was interlaced with a lot of mistakes that I committed, including the over enthusiasm and euphoria that might have scared you away. It is really hard to trust an eccentric, I understand your dilemma. I am not blaming you, I am just lamenting about my own self that always manage to spook good people that life throws my way.

You’ll know from my other letters, my ‘love letters’ hardly carry any love. They are unequivocally bitter about myself and everything that I managed to mess up. These reflections are reminiscent of the dark abyss through which I swim everyday, every moment of my life. This overwhelmingly hard life through which I struggle to navigate. This place where I struggle hard to build any semblance of peace, only to be usurped by my own mistakes. Life must go on they say, not necessarily, I shout back. But I love this life so dearly not to even contemplate about taking it away, I must endure.

You must be thinking, of why I should be so swayed! The problem is that you are just a reason, my dearest!. I was always at the edge, struggling to find meaning and hold my life together. I slip at times, and you arrived at the right (?) time. It is not your fault, it is mine and mine only. At your college, you showed me that long queue of hapless people waiting for food packets. As much as their poverty is not their fault, this struggle of mine is not our fault. I will certainly see brighter days, I just have to hold on.

My thoughts are about you. What are you going through? People around you and the social media is telling me that you are alright. But how can I trust them? Your eyes tell me a different story. May be I am wrong, but I am concerned. It has been a good two weeks past our last meeting. This is long enough for you to forget me, I think. Whether it be love or hatred, your feelings towards me is not as strong as mine, I suspect. I tend to think of love and hatred as two extremes of the same amorphous entity. This gooey mess that misleads us so often. That lethargic lull to depression and suffering. A feeling this must be, but it is a snake that ends up spewing cobwebs in my lungs. A vicious fairy that rejoice as these cobwebs cause my mind’s chambers bleed. It renders my mind uninhabitable to the likes of you, my dear Tara. And then, it recedes to the background. This is a curse that no Marduk or Zepar (a poor choice indeed) could solve. I will have to live with this.

As Marquez might have concurred, I am fundamentally incapable of love. Whatever little chance that we have had, was foiled when you started avoiding me. You could have at least told me to not dream! Sure, this is not your fault, to be held responsible for my stray mind. I will have to clean up this, of course. I am just trying to unburden myself here. I don’t expect any sympathies from you, my dearest!

As we have already told each other, love is something that two people build for themselves. If you don’t want it, how can I insist? I know, the closure that I so much pine for may never come. You may never talk to me, my dearest Tara! But you should remember the reflections of Wordsworth that I read to your confused face on May the 9th. I read them to you with all the earnestness a man could muster. That was the baby steps of a man who was discovering love again, sitting amongst those statues of wise men, along the banks of an hopelessly polluted canal. Alleppey under clouds is a fantastic place to fall in love! Even if this love is ephemeral, I cannot thank you enough for washing away all my sorrows for a while. Now that they have made a comeback, I will have to fight. But this is my fight, this is what defines my life. I hoped for a while that you would be close to me in this, but alas, life had its own plans. Or maybe you’ll find it fit to talk to me. I don’t know.

I am once again resigning to the fickle randomness that had come to define my life for the longest time. This brief interlude was a blessing, I hope to learn a lot from this. Tara, my life is a crazy cauldron of interlacing miseries and euphoria. Between these two worlds I keep fluctuating, there is very little left for people who care for me. I think it is in your best interest to have abandoned me in this dark, strange, forest. I may very well find my way out or not, but I am happy to not drag you with me. At the least, you’ll have a happy life and I will be content. My apologies if this schmaltzy letter came out as an cheap attempt at professing my love. I am afraid, this letter is more about me than anybody else. I made no attempt to conceal this fact. For if you cannot see me for what I am, it is fruitless to explore whatever that may have grown between us, clearly against our wishes.

This is the last of all letters that I will write to you. If you are to read this somehow, you should know that the rest of letters are lying in my cupboard, buried deep under many sheets of soulless prose, waiting for you. I don’t know of what life has in store for both of us. Whatever that may be, my apologies to have come across as this impatient, almost deranged, reckless young man who doesn’t mind wreaking havoc in pursuit of his confused emotions. Not just with you, but the trail of destruction that I have left behind is long and dusty. It is paved with consensual sins that could have altered my psyche for ever. This is a bonfire from which you have wisely stayed away. I wish you good luck, my dearest Tara!

May our paths never cross, may our eyes never meet each other! May our lips forget each other, as we resign to find love in quarters we once abandoned for good. As we mine our past in search for the gems that never existed, may we learn more about ourselves. This tempest shall recede and we shall see sunshine. I will forget you, as I have forgotten everything else. You will forget me, as you have forgiven everything else. And in that, we will be reborn as lovers in paradise - a life we create post the summer of 2019. Not in love with each other, but with some else. This unforgiving summer has altered the political fortunes of our country forever. It is painful to us too, for these are the star-crossed times that we chose to run into each other. This damned spell where we ended up hurting each other. This shouldn’t have been the way it ended up. I can only lament!

May we meet again as strangers in that brave new world. I promise to be gentler next time! To be mindful and a bit more careful. May be we will win our hearts next time. A time when we will never know so much about each other in so little time. A slow winter sunshine of romance, may be? Not his tempestuous, passionate coming together of two worlds and the quick resentment which ensued. Apologies, my dearest! I am your road not taken, and that will make all the difference.

Bye Tara. I will miss you.

Yours,
Sagar.