Love doesn't come first

The silence grows bigger. It has been a relatively silent week. Perhaps on one end, there are many blessings to count. On the other, the gnawing, growing silence compels me not to.

There isn’t much to cheer about actually. Life goes on in the most mundane of circumstances. There are taxes to file. Stuff to work on. Problems to solve. In the middle of it all, something feels missing. A gaping hole that yearns to be filled but because it depends on me and me being a man of inertia, it doesn’t look like things will end anytime soon.

I’d love to love. Just that it isn’t happening to me. It hasn’t happened for the past years of my life. And I think it probably won’t. Not in the short term anyway.

***

I wasn’t expecting to see something new on her site. This stemmed from the impression formed because she hasn’t updated it since February. Yet, on a casual round of surfing this morning, I saw this:

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars

For a very short time, the stars in my sky were once lighted up very brightly but now, they have all died and fallen. Two months ago, I was at Harbin, the weather was minus 20 degrees celsius. I thought it was cold but I realised the inside world of my heart was colder. Last night, I had a very bad gastric pain but I realised I felt more pain in my heart than anything else. Our heart is a very interesting organ, I wonder will mine ever stop working at the rate it is going. I miss the lighted stars but they are all gone now.”

Poignant and only because there were moments in our lives when we shared the same view of the stars above. Back then, they probably represented the future, which was shrouded from us. The stars were brimming with specks of twinkling lights that seemed to be telling collectively that “the future’s good, the future’s bright and the future beckons”. Being in our twenties, we haven’t weaned ourselves off the habit of being impressionable and we took whatever impressions we had back with us, believing that the future’s ours.

Life changes in a split second, let alone eight long years. I believe we loved each other then and we were just short of making it official. Now the stars are just dim. Probably it is because we no longer share the privilege of staring into the same night sky together anymore. Or probably it is because we now find ourselves busy with our own little lives in the middle of a city where the buzzing lights of buildings, streets and cars have all but blocked out the little shimmering of lights from distant heavens. Then somewhere, somehow when we look up to the sky and see the fuzzy impressions of a star, the tingling sensation of pain surfaces, remains and gnaws before it fades away.

At the same time, the pain reminds that the love may still not be lost. That the embers, long turned into ashes, will somehow burn again. That all it takes is a step forward…

Memories can do cruel things to a mind sometimes. Perhaps that’s why many would rather choose to forget.

If anything, I haven’t had the sky lighted up for a long time already, but the pain, albeit already faint, remains.