It doesn’t begin on one random morning but it does begin one morning.
Gradually, all the things you’ve ignored start surfacing, and you realize it’s either disrespect, or the love you feel for them is beyond and above it.
In Sufism, they say love has seven stages: Dilkashi (attraction), Uns (infatuation), Ishq (love), Akidat (trust or reverence), Ibadat (worship), Junoon (madness), and Maut (death of the ego).
I think there is one more stage of love , the death of your true self.
The identity you become starts to blur, and for once, you think the person you’re with is your true self because the love you feel for them, of course, is beyond the self.
So, you wait for them to notice that you’re losing your appetite for life.
On the contrary, you don’t know why you want to walk away, yet you don’t know how to walk, either.
Your feet tremble at the thought; it sends your heart to your hands to shiver, and you become cold at the dining table, quiet on long-missed calls, forgotten in their presence during your hardest times.
What follows next is an absently present, they’ve become the ghost while still being with you.
The room of your heart was supposed to be occupied; how come you have become the elephant in the room?
Days pass. You visit them, but they look unfamiliar, and you start questioning yourself — is this the love they talk about?
Fairy tales tell you how love begins, but they never tell you how it starts to end.
You start revisiting old chats to linger in their homely presence longer because you’ve become an immigrant in their heart.
You look at old photographs where they once asked for more of you, you look at all the times you fell asleep on phone calls and now, it’s vacant.
You stalk them online, watch their stories reluctantly, answer questions on their behalf, because your heart can’t accept what your mind already knows. You promised yourself this time it would be different.
And then you try to lock the door but keep the window open, sitting at the threshold, hoping they remember the key. And you know they won’t. Their pride won’t let them.
What keeps you bound next is the familiar scent of nostalgia.
You wonder if they miss you like you miss them, if half of their breath still carries your name. You scroll through their following, their photos, their tagged posts trying to decode if they’ve found someone new to forget your scent, or if it’s only you who keeps being haunted. Suddenly, their favourite dish becomes every stranger’s favourite dish. And out of nowhere, you smell a familiar cologne in the air, the one where you once buried your neck.
You cry to God, asking the big sky why it’s you as if the sky is vast enough to hold your grief. You mute them, restrict them, and then your phone decides it’s the perfect time to make a montage of ghosts.
You look at yourself in the mirror and all you can see are their ashes on your skin. So, like any sane person, you go to the gym, get a haircut, and plan a glow-up so they’ll regret what they’ve lost. You sweat beyond your capacity, break your leg the next day, and still upload your gym photo for instant gratification , likes, comments, and temporary validation. Then comes a long-lost crush who suddenly remembers you and wants to have you (in bed).
You scroll through Instagram to laugh and forget, and there it is: a tarot reading
“They’re missing you.”
“They want to come back.”
Of course they are , behind the block button.
You suddenly start believing in astrology and tarot readings. Oh, they broke your heart because Mercury is in retrograde. Oh, you feel lost because Pluto is transiting.
Now, you’re subscribing to every tarot reader and astrologer you can find,
and paying them to tell you what’s wrong with the planets, not within you.
And then one day, you go searching for closure only to find the door closed.
In fact, it’s vacant yet occupied. You can’t give the room to someone new because their footsteps still echo through the walls. So you go out not for yourself, but for them, to make them jealous though they can’t see it.
Then comes the turn that turns you. You bump into someone, and of all the ways the universe could’ve chosen to reunite two known strangers it chooses today. You see them with a new partner. You go home, bury your head in a pillow, and scream that you’re so over them. Unless you’re someone like me who likes their suffering raw, and doesn’t suppress emotions or their liver by smoking or drinking. Neither do I have to because I’m from Delhi.
You stay awake the whole night, staring at the ceiling, and let your heartbeat bleed quietly into the cry. But here comes the bleeding in disguise, your skin is glowing in the morning, and you look so tragically beautiful while crying, oh, you long-lost Victorian-age drama protagonist.
And finally, comes the day when you drop the curtain on the drama.
You’ve tried everything from sinking your head into work, to sweating it out in the gym, to sitting in the corner crying.
But now, here comes my heart-healer warrior the one who decides to go to therapy, to fix themselves, to trace the patterns of their relationships and the correlations between their childhood and the partners they attract.
It doesn’t all end in one day. It starts ending gradually from asking for the strength to walk away, to healing your relationship with the divine, until you start to smell what truly stinks. You peel back the layers, one by one.
You cry through the hidden million heartbreaks, you journal, you show up for therapy, you start showing up for yourself. And finally, one day the shadow of them starts splitting from you, and you recognize yourself again.
Ping
And there they are.
They came back.
