What is
it, this attraction? This brain fuzziness that makes you act unlike yourself,
makes you regress to just ego, the need to satisfy a desire?
I tell
myself that we won’t meet again. He seems like a pseudo-liberal, entitled bigot
(I am sure!), not even attractive, but my stomach is churning, churning,
churning the whole day, and Anu finds me mooning on the wall-encompassing bathroom
mirror, and I wasn’t even saying things aloud this time.
I tell
myself that it’s nothing, that it does not matter. That he won’t message, I won’t
message, that I will forget.
But knowing
this won’t make it hurt any less when it happens, when the time comes, and I won’t
ask, he won’t ask. I won’t confirm a meeting, and he won’t.
Only the
longing, longing, longing, at the end of long days,
When I come
home, unslept, lay down my tired body, and watch myself give over to sleep. But
before that, there will remembering, of imagined kisses and love bites, and oh,
hello! I liked this and this too.
There will
be texting, to another someone I have not even met, but her north Indian casual
nothings, her good mornings, her bad English make me feel warm and wanted. I wonder
what she is using me for, but I am happy to be a part of it as long as it
lasts.
Until that
too goes away, and the days resume their usual, sassy appeal – of knowing that I
can kick ass, that I will get the job done, that there’s nothing to be afraid
of.
No more doubting,
wondering if I am good enough, thinking whether he liked me, whether I was
boring, why he did not call.
This is
not a paean to anybody, definitely not to a man I don’t even know. It’s just a
moment, and that it happened is no less real because it was fleeting, and
because feeling this way is not particularly rational of me.
