That was the last, I would see of her, the very last. I still did not have a job having been pretty choosy, earlier. Now at the end of the season I was scared I would be left high and dry. She left that very day, to her new place for a couple of months, for her internship.
I did not make it to the station, or to her room for the ritual goodbyes. I did not know how I would react, and I did not want to do anything that would have embarrassed her. However, before leaving she did ask me to come and meet her once, and I promised her I would do that.
We messaged pretty frequently. She showed no great interest in my work or my life, just a passing remark “Oh that’s good, just hang on don’t worry something nice would happen”.
Slowly, the distance seemed to have caught up with us. I sensed a marked difference in the way she conversed with me now, the deference, and the respect was slowly waning away. It’s funny how people change, really very. Messages, chats calls all the initiatives were now largely unidirectional, which is not good for a healthy relationship. There has to be reciprocation in type not merely the existence of a sympathetic, patient audience.
I once asked her about vacancies in the place she interned. Her tone changed from conversational to one of unhidden contempt, so much so that I was shaken by the intensity of it. Either she is not really happy with her place or she seems to think it is heights of ineptitude on my part to ask for a push in the right place.
The former did not seem to be true, as she seemed rather happy with her work. That left the latter, which ostensibly indicated her juvenile and immature self. Two years in school I have understood , education is just one part of it, relationships are more important or rather the only takeaway. I had once got an assignment from a friend who I met for 2 hours on a train journey and I still ask for her help on some creative aspects if my work demands it.
The same stuff which used to interest her, my impromptu acronyms on situations, teaser names, and humor now seemed to be irritating her. Once I referred to her as a princess indicating her standing among her gang of friends, and she snapped back almost ready to bite” I am not a princess, and please stop calling me that”.
I thought it was workplace pressures, for the first time I joined an office I too had slight trouble transgressing from an academic to a corporate profile. I could make out that her family was conservative to the C, and the ostensible development of a non societal relationship between us was scaring her and maybe she needed more time.
I did everything possible to justice her behavior, but as we have a saying in Hindi, loosely translated, the more leeway you give the more audacious become the bets. No matter how well you dress a stable boy, in royal clothes, there will always be a tiny speck of shit in his spit polished shoes.
Same is the case with deference.
Some people are patently not qualified to handle deference. If you treat a donkey like a horse just because it has four legs, it does not get the same elegance of a horse automatically.
Some people are patently not qualified to handle deference. If you treat a donkey like a horse just because it has four legs, it does not get the same elegance of a horse automatically.
“I won’t change, so please don’t have any hope about the relationship between us, I would like to be good friends with you nothing more”, that was the curt, haughty response I got from her on one call, no correction that’s on chat, she did not have the basic courtesy of even calling me and being respectful about ending it.
But you know the thing with promise; it is very hard to break one.
It is like the tiny morsel of food, caught between your teeth somewhere, you just have to remove it. You loll your tongue use your fingers and finally use a tooth brush.
The same happened, I called, then texted and then mailed. Finally I decided to meet her once to close it.
It is funny as to how much hurt one person is capable of causing in other. There is always a reason, a method to madness and nobody could wish that away or run away from it. There was a reason for hope to exist, between us, and that was pleasure and happiness, by the same logic there has to be a reason for it to not exist. There was a time when she and me were both having a good time, just because we were not physical close, was no reason to terminate.
Anyway this is guessing, for I still do not know the reason as to why she pushed me away from her or in modern colloquialism dumped me without even telling me the reason.
Hurt, humiliated, confused, and at cross roads, without a decent job to my credit, (but a loan on my head, !)n my I got a call from a place in Bangalore after a lot of pushes from my end.
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