Pensez Ici

Dear Lover,

We had a scare, prematurely in the scheme of this thing we’ve found ourselves in, perhaps even imagined, but a scare it was. It’s terrifying when your body does exactly what your mind does not want it to do. We dealt with it. We had a talk, not to evaluate where we stood, but just to summarize and put an end to something that shouldn’t have happened, but did and some part of me is glad. It made me happy when you said some part of you was also glad because whether we liked it or not, the stakes had changed and this was an acknowledgement of that. It didn’t mean we owed each other anything, or anything more, but there is something to be said for collectively dealing with the same thing and getting out not demolished. We spoke of things we had steadfastly avoided, we had spoken about not speaking about it because speaking about things make them real and we didn’t want them to be too real too fast. I told you I liked knowing where I was with people. It didn’t mean that I needed validation in words, but I just needed to know that you were there, and you were, and my statement was an affirmation of that. I told you I didn’t know how to go slow, and that not having access to you all the time and in every way I wanted to was forcing me to process things slowly. You said you knew I didn’t have access to you, and while for a second I found you mean for withholding yourself from me, I was grateful that you were perceptive enough to understand this about me early on and push me to inhale this thing you and I are doing slowly, to extract the most from what it is now than to dwell on what could be. I should apologize but I won’t and I don’t think you’d want me to, because despite how ever much I may want to be immune to the seduction of it, I’m a girl who falls, and falls hard when I do. Something tells me you actually like that about me. You know it about me so you’re treading carefully. I went to a friend’s exhibition recently. It had a quote from some Jane Austen novel, and it read, “A woman’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.” After the first time we went out, I came home and googled you and saw some photos you’d taken and was floored, thought I could love you and mentally said your last name after my first. This was before the exhibition, but you can imagine how mortified I was when my shameful self-indulgence was so explicitly displayed in a public forum, grouping me with every other girl who met a man and flashed forward into their future. You’ve taught me to rein myself in but let go once in a while, and I’m beginning to see the beauty in this balance. It’s something alien to me, so try and understand my fascination with it, and my exhilaration at somewhat achieving it.

You’ve left town for a few days, and even though a couple of months have passed since that initial flutter I felt when I first became excited about this, I googled your name because I can’t call you and saw those photos and thought, I wish I knew more about you, or knew you then. But I guess you wouldn’t have been the kind of man to spend time with a girl like me then. You were out searching for adventures and catastrophes – you still are – to capture and I was, as you love to say so often, barely legal. Sometimes I find myself scrambling for these secondary sources of information about you because there’s so much I don’t know, and then I stop myself immediately, thinking how much more satiating it will be to have you show and tell me these things yourself. You’re private about yourself, and I like that slowly, I’m finding my way into your inner world. But who knows? I might be wrong. You once said jokingly, I’m your delusion, a voice inside your head tarabedi, and it had been a while since I’d seen you and I thought, my god, he might be right. And if you are a mere figment, then I should congratulate my imagination for giving form to you, because, you, my love, are beautiful.

I hope you never read this, because I know I’m revealing too much. But I feel like you already know this, so maybe I don’t mind that you do. Maybe I want you to, I am the girl with the key to her heart on her wrist. But I know that despite all the easy access, you like that I can still surprise you.

Robert Pinsky wrote, when I had no lover, I courted sleep and my lover, while you’re gone, what better way to fall asleep than while thinking of you.

Goodnight. 

Last night, I bumped into a guy I’d been crazy about when I was 16. At the time, he was 25, had long hair, stubble, stoned eyes and torn tobaccoed lips. Compared to my 16 year old male friends, who shaved their unbroken cheeks every day and high-fived each other at the hint of a five-o-clock shadow, R was the ultimate adonis. I met him for the first time when he came to Dalhousie as an intern with my father’s company. He spent that summer in our home, dressed in my father’s old jeans and faded Channel 4 sweatshirts because he’d lost his own clothes on the bus ride up from Delhi. My entire family thought he was an idiot. I thought he was perfect. We played pool once, and I asked him how much older he was than me. He said 9 years, which he thought was a lot, and I told him it really wasn’t, in the hopes of closing up that age gap, making him see me as anything but a child.

Now that I think about it, he must have known how much I loved him. I did such blatant and stupid things. I once chased down an acquaintance for a DVD of a film that R had an extremely minor role in, just so I could bring it up casually in conversation. I must have said a million mortifying things to get his attention. I confided in my cousin, my then confidante who worked closely with him, and she would tell me all the times he had mentioned me or asked about me, insinuating that there was some interest. I lapped it all up, ravenous. Of course, I know better now, because there were many things she lied to me about. But part of me always wonders whether he felt anything for me, even if it was brotherly or some other form of patronizing affection that an older boy feels for a younger girl. I used to bum cigarettes off him, titillated by the fact that he indulged my whim, and that we shared a secret.

R came up to my mother last night, giving her a big hug and a kiss on each cheek. I only got one. I’m friends with him on Facebook and browse through his profile once in a while, so I know what he looks like. Yet, last night, when I saw him clean shaven and in a suit, I was caught completely off guard. It’s very rare that I feel like a lot of time has passed, it’s presumptuous for a 22 year-old to think that way. But when I saw him, I thought, wow, it’s been years. Of course, in my usual fashion, I behaved standoffish and cold almost, pretending not to pay attention because I was so mortified by my 16 year old self and the unfiltered unabashed tide of feelings I felt then.

So, to you, R, I’m saying now because I couldn’t last night, it’s good to see you, I enjoyed being in teenaged love with you, and let’s catch up for a drink and a cigarette sometime.

I meet all these people and I talk to them and I talk to other people
About stuff and classes and things
and go out and drink and stay in and study and
there’s so much time
I know it used to be you but now I have to fill it with other things
and sadness murmurs to me sometimes when I’m sleeping, or when I see things that remind me of you.
I didn’t know I missed you
Remembering is so short and forgetting is so long
I read that in a poem

Here. I wrote something for you.

A few days ago was my grandfather’s (my father’s father’s) 22nd death anniversary. He died, I believe, of either cancer or a heart condition - it’s still unclear which, no one really talks about it - on September 12th, 1988. I was 3 months old. Naturally, I don’t remember his death, nor do I remember him.

When Ma mentioned it, she said she couldn’t believe it had been 22 years (and in my typical persecuted second child manner, I thought immediately that everyone probably blamed me for being a bad omen).

“What was he like?” I asked.

“He was a good man,” she replied, and proceeded for the next couple of hours to tell me stories of how irrationally angry he got at the smallest of gaffes. The tears slipping into her shallow crows feet told me she really believed he was good, despite all his idiosyncrasies. I felt a twinge of sadness hearing these anecdotes, but was secretly thankful that he wasn’t alive, imagining how restricted my currently liberal lifestyle would be.

I think of my grandmother, my Dadi, and how she is today - almost 80 years old, completely lucid, living on her own, driving on her own, no real diseases or ailments, walking for an hour every morning with an iPod tucked into her pocket and playing 50 Cent, an active member in her Rotary and responsible for setting up schools for the underprivileged, sending emails and surfing the net, texting me the occasional “whassup? luv dadi,” serving me a cold beer with lunch, okay with the tattoos on my body, enjoying cappuccinos every afternoon with her girlfriends, traveling to Mexico all the way from India to see her crazy brother who married someone 30 years younger than him - all these things I would never expect even of myself at that age, she is and does almost effortlessly. Would she be so progressive (by generational and Indian standards), so self reliant had Dada not died?

Ma and Dadi both love to tell the story of how they walked in on my older brother riding Dada like a pony one afternoon. Another favorite is when my brother threw a glass full of hot milk on the television when Dada tried coaxing him into drinking it. I know my life is pretty comfortable right now, and I wouldn’t really want to change it, and having Dada around and in the house would probably make things significantly different. I wish sometimes, though, that he was there for me to take such liberties with. I think we might have liked each other.