... AND THE CURTAINS FALL !

The taxi sped past the luscious greens of the racecourse on one hand and the mews on the other, as the lyrics of the song playing from the radio filled up my head, and a tear rolled out of my eyes… Reality had finally hit me. After 50 days of willfully choosing to live in my dreams, my utopian world was destroyed as easily as the bridge made from a pack of cards.

We had travelled the same route the first time I had met him, and today, memories of the 15 months together clamored in my head, almost mockingly. It seemed as if a lifetime had passed me by in the brief period. Getting on with life without him seemed like a herculean task. Everything had seemed so perfect; we’d eaten, slept and watched movies together, danced together, and could talk endlessly to each other! But it wasn’t love… not for him! He had candidly proclaimed a number of times that “WE” wouldn’t last. Perhaps, the relationship didn’t seem as beautiful to him as it did to me. He was always looking; looking for beauty outside of the “WE”.

But the distant hope of things working out just never seemed to die; until today of course! In spite of consciously avoiding his thought, I realized that I had always been thinking only of him; even after he parted ways with me. The phone calls had nearly died (‘nearly’ was as close to ‘totally’ as possible). He had found something that interested him more. Another object of affection which suited his needs more than I could ever provide emotionally and physically. I was faced with the most difficult task assigned to me in my lifetime. Murphy had played his wicked trick on me once again, and I had to emerge as unscathed from this episode as I could manage.

It was then that I stepped out from being the woman who was in love, to one who didn’t care much for emotions. It’s quite paradoxical though, that the man who brought me in contact with my emotions was scared away by their intensity. I had given a man a lot of importance in my life without his consent. He had always disconnected me from his emotions (that he claimed to have none is a statement I didn’t believe then and refuse to believe). As I viewed the situation from a third person’s perspective, I could only laugh at the hopeless fool I had made of myself. When he said, “One person always gives more than the other in a relationship,” I volunteered to be the ‘giver’, thinking this probably meant that he was seeing the “WE”. Little did I realize that the statement applied to a ‘relationship’ and not to something that could at best be termed as an ‘affair’; one that even he refused to acknowledge.

As these thoughts afforded some much needed clarity, I asked myself, “Am I not better off now without all the emotional assault that my heart had to go through periodically when I was with him?” And for the first time in 15 months there was no confusion, as I could hear a strong resounding YES that came unadulterated from my heart. I wiped the tear away from my face and smiled back at life, as if to say, “Bring it on… I can take this and much more!”