“Simple. Seamless. So quick to set up. With local files. On Spotify.” The headphones are not mine, and itch with the discomfort of earpads that haven’t molded to the shape of my ears over days and weeks and months of sleepless nights.
The lake is beautiful tonight.
There are no stars but the pinpricks of lights beyond 2.8 are burning into the sky and the water, leaving rivulets of moonlight white on the calm, dark expanse.
The night breeze is cut with razor sharp flashes of lightning, and the hint of petrichor settling heavy on my skin, washing away the heat and sweat of the 20th NALSAR University of Law Convocation Day.
Strains of music float up to the terrace, my ankle hooked against the railing. The touch of breeze, promising impending rain, is like a blanket I left too long in an AC room before my skin warms it up. It brushes against the small of my back, where my shirt has ridden up, and leaves trails of ice in its wake.
The music is drowning out the crick in my neck and the blisters on my feet. As it turns out, when you take a last walk on Flag Road with someone you won’t see in quite a while, it never is just “one more round”. It’s been two whirlwind days of movement and blurs of memories and last times and one more time’s and do you remember when’s.
These thoughts have crept in with the two bottles of beer that did little but take the edge off the feeling building in the crackling ozone in the lump of my throat.
You’re seeing someone, kind of, and I was braced for it, if incompletely, and after tonight I will never be as much in love with you again.
And after this month, it will fade, if incompletely, and I will be able to roll my eyes at that stupid scratch you left on the library desk, and smile without feeling the strange pang of rusted nails digging into my chest.
But I will love you despite it, and I couldn’t be any happier and prouder tonight, the night you graduate law school. For the incomplete, lacking, immature, kind person that you are, I’m just happy that I found you anyway. And I can and will love you still, even when the thought of you no longer makes that crooked line that runs down from my thumb to my wrist, pound with racing blood, or my breath get tangled in side glances and little bits of stolen time.
There are silvery crosswords of spider webs in the diamond shaped gaps of the terrace railings. I blink, and the row of lights on 2.8 blur into each other in a tangled, saline mess.
There is a loneliness to the lake. This vast expanse of rippling waves eating into what was once solid land and rocks and shrubbery. It spreads and spreads and grows more every passing year. What used to be a shrunken puddle feeding hungrily on the erratic Telangana monsoons, has turned into this insatiable leviathan, growing massive and devouring all in its path.
It rained all through the beginning of this odd semester. The smooth, rounded rocks that we used to sit on with Anuv Jain playing on a worn down JBL speaker, were swallowed up by the ever-ravenous lake in the space of a few weeks.
I brush my fingers against the pebbled cement, pushing up my glasses to rub at my eyes. They sting, under the warmth of my palm. There is something that grows a little older and larger in me every year, and every year it grows wilder. Every time it does, I tell myself that I will love less. That I will love, only to be held close and tight and loved in return. That I will love, only if my eyes stray to an errant gaze looking right back.
There is a bat swooping low among the branches of the neem tree. The silence of its leathery wings is punctuated by glimmers of moonlight on its dark body in flight. I wonder what happened to that baby owl who lived in one of the trees on the mess lawn; that shook the rain off its feathers like a disgruntled puppy and retreated into the cleft in the bark. I wonder if this year, the pair of parrots that lived between the loose bricks of one of the hostel buildings will return to build their nest again.
You were nervous this morning before it started. Laughing it off and telling me not to worry even as your fingers fidgeted with the worn strap of the sorry excuse of a generational legacy of your graduation gown, flapping behind you like an absurd cape of crow’s tail feathers. I remember hissing in disapproval at the frankly absurd security deposit of 2000 rupees for the gown and cap. It made you laugh harder and your hands finally slip down from the threadbare strap into your pockets.
And despite that lump in my throat hissing at me to stop, to retreat into a shell of security and unfeeling, there is that voice in my head that will speak gibberish and nineteenth century poetry and whisper for me to jump headlong off these cliffs, blindfolded and dizzy and reckless. It is the only way I’ve ever known how to love.
I will love the way your fingers tangle in the mess of your hair when you’re thinking, and how you throw your arm around me when you’re reading over my shoulder, or the way you duck out of reach when you’ve annoyed me too much.
You leave a note on my desk when you’re taking a music break, or come back to make sure I didn’t skip dinner, and I will love the way it makes me feel like you won’t leave.
You’re leaving tonight.
And your life will be this frenzied push-pull of work and life and living, while I meander through a few years more protected by the bubble of everything that I don’t know. And I will still love the way I know you’ll pick up when I bring myself to call, sleep-deprived and desperation fuelled.
There is an aching loneliness to loving this way. When you seem to always be looking for somewhere to put this vast amount of love that’s locked in your chest, struggling to suffocate you, and rising up your throat even as you bite your tongue and choke it down.
When there is this constant fear, that when it’s been a while, and thoughts of you have turned into an embarrassing drunk admission, and I have found it in myself to forget, and begin again, there will still be no one who can love me the way I know I can love: frighteningly, ravenously, hopelessly.
There is a quieter, but deeper fear that no matter how hard I try, I will not be able to put into words this love that I feel, this love that I cannot speak of, but only show, in my own rough, jagged, irrational way. This love that I hide in teasing quips and harsh barbs and cutting remarks laced with the desperation of an affection that aches to be let out.
And you will never know, because I will do my best to never let you realize, even as every atom in my body screams to be found.
The music over the headphones has begun to loop on itself. I adjust the ear pads, and switch to a different playlist. I didn’t bring Odomos, so I’ll have to go back downstairs soon.
For a moment longer, I will sink back against the cement and think of the way you looked today, grinning and sun-drunk, ridiculously picking your way through a river of marigolds to squeeze me tight and shout your elation into my windblown hair.
For every person that loves quietly, desperately, stupidly, recklessly, for everyone who wants to be found out, for the ones who walk around with all this love they have to give trapped inside their chests, there are these nights.
And with the strains of unrecognizable music, there is the deafening sound of moonlight on the ripples in the lake, tempestuous and still growing.