I'm not the one you want, babe

Its amazing what people do for love. For an ideal that no one is really sure exists, though everyone wants to feel and everyone prays it lasts. It's amazing the pursuit, the waiting, the misinterpretation, that people go through, when the signs are so clear that this emotion, with this particular person, is unrequited.

When you spend a year waiting for someone you aren't even sure you 'love' to call.

When you drop everything you have planned when s/he calls, just so you can meet him/her when s/he has so kindly made time for you in his/her busy schedule.

When you try to ignore your entire belief system and upbringing in an attempt to understand someone so foreign to your experience, and so fascinating, just because his/her eyes are like a transparent sheet of ice over stone and glaze over in emotions you wish would be transparent.

When you spend hours, days, weeks, agonising, attempting to learn the language of his/her body without the help of an interpreter or a dictionary.

When you try to change the fundamentals of your personality to acomodate him/her.

When everytime you give up hope and turn to more positive romantic possibilities a fateful phonecall or an SMS stops you in your tracks and snaps open those blinders and you stand, uncertain.

You wonder if fate is actually stopping you from pursuing the more favourable romantic possibilities because it keeps dropping him/her back in your life like a much-desired baby from a stork.

You dismiss the other possibilities for the moment and try to start afresh, again and again, like a couple in marital counseling, realising but willing to deal with the scales tipped against YOU, be it in terms of affection, understanding, need, or fear.

Yet, for once, that other possibility persists, and you wonder, surprised, and try to shoo it away. Again, for once, it refuses to leave. Now you are left with a bird in the hand and one in the bush, and you remember that proverb and try to paste it on the walls of your reluctant heart.

Having captured your attention once again, the object of YOUR affection turns away, satisfied, confusing you. But it's beginning to have happened once too often. You're beginning to smarten up, because for once, you dont have to be left out in the cold, begging for crumbs off doorsteps. And that sensation empowers you.

You take a stand. And you think you're going to win. Because you think you're no longer attached. You realise that fate was sending no signals of the sort you were hoping for. Rather, with its devil's horns and snapping tongue, it merely sent a temptation your way, looking to cackle as you tripped. Again. But you've wisened up.

But the devil, on the side of your hunt, is smarter still. In a final coup de grace, the most stunning rendezvous you ever have with your object, turns out to be the last. Irony of ironies, indeed. His fingers press at your temples, ungraciously yet with precision shoving your brain into mush, and refusing to let go no matter how much you beg. His tongue snaps in glee at your mortification, the fumes of sulphur drawning out any other sensation. The song you never want to hear resonates as you drown into the quagmire of a blind man's dreams as s/he melts back into the night at his/her own chosen speed, having delivered his/her final veiled insult.

And you wonder why it didnt occur to you sooner that you were merely being stubborn. When you were in love with an ideal all along. When your passion blinded you. When as soon as you took a stand, your object would run away. When as soon as s/he thought you seemed ready to let go, s/he hastily dropped the bomb first. And you realise s/he was as deluded as you were. And you don't know whether to correct that misconception or just let it go.

But you know you haven't asked for too much because the one who stays is standing a little away, strongly, yet shyly offering his/her heart to you. To love, protect and cherish, just the way you are. To give him/her the chance to be the one you want. Someone who will lead by example, not through blustering rhetoric.

And then you know, shuddering in a fever of awareness though you are, that you'd be cruel, and far more, a fool, to let it go. And you smile wanly at the full circle your life seems to be finally coming to.

*

The paradox of life is that nothing strengthens like experience, and yet, nothing weakens as much either.

Been reading this post and it's got me grateful that Ive been relatively lucky. The warnings and telltale signs can be applied to a variety of relationships. Do read, especially all you women.