Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Sitting at a Crossroad

They say that time heals all wounds. What if there are some kinds of wounds that just don’t heal, and in so doing, they fester and become gangrenous to such an extent that a part of you has to be cut off to ensure that the rest of you lives…incomplete, yes, but alive? And is such a life then worth living if the part that was removed was the part that you had cherished and nurtured the most, if that part was at the core of how you identified yourself? And shouldn’t the people who inflict such wounds be changed too in some way proportionate to the damage?

I feel myself at a crossroads right now, where I have the choice to decide which way I shall go. After having been forcibly removed, as if by a surgeon’s knife, from a life I had known and loved, I find myself adrift. The paths in front of me are deceptively simple – life or death. And contrary to popular opinion, death this time is the easier choice. After all, what is death but removing from yourself the option to choose? And in a lot of ways, isn’t that so much simpler?

From time immemorial, I have been indoctrinated in the theory of destiny and paradoxically, of making your own destiny. Isn’t the point of destiny that it hunts you down no matter how much you try to escape? And along with destiny, comes the theory of ‘karmic circle’, what goes around comes around, etc. When the love of my life broke my heart and my spirit and walked away from me apparently unscathed, I thought back to the time when I had done the exact same thing to a man who had loved me. And while doing so, I realised just how many similarities there were between the two relationships, roles reversed ofcourse. Indeed I had often referred to this as “an improvement on first love”. But then I also see the subtle differences. And that is only to be expected – after all, no two loves are the same, and hence the problems also cannot be the exact same, no matter how close they are.

In the case of my first love, I had left him because he was too possessive of me, didn’t like me going out with anyone new, asked me a thousand irrelevant questions, and it simply didn’t work for me. But in this case, I didn’t like to party as much as he did, wasn’t as involved in my career as he was in his, had had an above average love life, wasn’t possessive (‘possessiveness is a sign that you truly care about your love’), etc. As a result of all this, he blamed me for making him drop his friends, not have as much of a social life as he used to.. etc etc. At the end of the day, it simply didn’t work for him. So in a way, it was the karmic circle, coming back to haunt me.

I guess my sense of being betrayed comes from the fact that I had always assumed that we could talk about anything, and indeed we did. But obviously not about what was important, and obviously he wasn’t that honest. In all the conversations we had, one thing that featured hugely was my prolific love life – prolific by his standards – and he held it against me that at the age of 26, I had been in love with someone before. And all the while, I just think he was trying to build up a solid enough case to leave me – “I left her because I couldn’t handle her past”. When that became too wimpy a reason to leave, he got back with me, and then built up a reason which was “why didn’t she understand that I wanted her to have nothing to do with him, without me having to say it? She never really got me.” From this manipulation, I have to assume that he never really loved me.

But the heartbreak lies in this: The man I loved and adored so much wasn’t the man who would have manipulated me and my feelings just to save his own face. The man I loved would have just told me that he wasn’t in love with me anymore, and that honesty would have been just so much better than this sense of wondering whether the last year had happened at all.

And hence the crossroads I mentioned. Sitting here, I have to choose between making this one true-blue genuine heartbreak the reason for me to stop believing in love at all, or shall I use it as it should be used – a life lesson? The former leads me to a slow painful death, and the latter leads me to a slow painful recovery. The choice seems obvious, but death is just so much preferable right now. Because that would mean that I don’t ever have to open myself, to open my heart to another person who might prove to be undeserving or worse find me so, to never again give another person a part of myself which he might destroy unthinkingly, and in a way, destroy me slowly. It would mean never again hating yourself for loving someone so much that it kills you to find out that you never meant that much anyway. And finally it would mean never having to painstakingly try and put the little pieces of your heart back together, and task that becomes more and more impossible as the frequency of the breaks increases.

The other option is far too painful to imagine… and yet so very simple. I have to accept that he was just another person, dealing with his life and his flaws, and his strengths, and reacting to energies that were buffeting him from all sides. He did the best he could, as he knew how. And at the end of the day, that’s all that can be expected of anyone. Even me. I have to accept that maybe he loved me and maybe he didn’t… and maybe he went about it all wrong or maybe it was all right… maybe it was malicious and maybe it wasn’t. But I have to accept the fact that it wasn’t my fault or his. We just weren’t destined to be.

That means, my destiny lies elsewhere. Someone once said that if you have a dream, you also have the power to make it come true. I have a dream – of a house full of friends, family and love, of a fulfilling life – and now I know that he probably wasn’t part of that dream. And hence, one can’t possibly hate him for it, no matter how much it hurts now. So as I stare at the crossroads open in front of me, I realise that my choice has been made. I choose life, no matter how much it hurts. Atleast it means I’m alive. Which means my wounds have a chance to heal. And they shall.

1 comment:

Searcher said...

Holy shit, girl! I'm from 10 years later and I just dropped in to say that you HAVE come a long way, and I'm thankful for the incredibly wise and tough 28 year old you were, even with yourself. Super Love.