But if you say just one word I’ll stay with you… — Saint Claude, Christine and the Queens.

  It didn’t take you long to figure out that nothing matters, whether it was the C note you accidentally hit during your piano exam when it really should have been D, or the flimsy piece of certificate you brought back home from the sailing trip.

  Back then, summer started from countless drowsy days blurring into each other. You lay on the grass with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth on your face, the conversations around you shifted from the Peterson-Žižek debate to I thought she was nice in the bathroom cubicles. You were learning about love and loss in Arundhati Roy’s first novel, reading postcolonial theories with an invincible look on your face, and that one Starbucks Pink Drink had made a fairly regular appearance on your Insta feed.

  It didn’t take you long to figure out none of that mattered too. It took you so long, however, to figure out that you are only qualified to look at the reflections of venture capitalists through shards of broken glass, and that the world prefers concrete numbers over the recurring motifs in The God of Small Things, that you are surplus to requirements. 

  You began solving him like a puzzle. His justified distaste for fish, his empty LinkedIn profile, his four-year relationship. You said sorry more times than was dignified. You still haven’t figured out how any of it became so serious.

  “I love you, and this is why you cannot love whoever you want.” You have no doubt that she means it. She has loved you like this her whole life, often folding it into the same breath as warnings. But in a world where Fanon and Bhabha and 1960s Kerala will no longer matter, neither will love. You still lean on her like you used to a long, long time ago, listening to her increasingly irregular heartbeats as she drones on, and on about meat as a luxury on Chinese New Year eves. You wish you could pull her in and say, I love you, and this is why every day, I go to sleep with a blurry vision of us huddling in our smallest bedroom. Between the clinking of sunflower seed shells and another palace murder in those absurd historical dramas we could not stop watching, it was our whole world.

  Somewhere between now and then, you would not be able to tell whether that desperation came from a burning desire to break free from love, or from another scavenger hunt through the past that turned up a void. Somewhere between now and then, you were told to build your own sanctuary from scratch, because the ones you keep scurrying back to are nothing but debris and rubble.

“I’ve learned my lesson. I really don’t want to mess it up again.” He says with the fiercest conviction. You wish him well, knowing that a simple “goodbye” has gnawed a hole in your heart. You try to fill it with tedious weekly essays, mindless scribbling on your desk mat and cup after cup of chamomile tea. Every night, you are caught in a limbo between restlessness for what could be and remorse for what could have been.

“Snap out of it.” You have lost count of how many times you have heard this. Yet night after night, you slide into the same fantasy, the one where he is in your sanctuary for a single day. You would be sitting on the windowsill at 5pm, because this is the time when all your emails would be met with automatic replies, when all the expectations would temporarily grind to a halt. The rays of sunlight could not wait to go home, and you’d tell him about your week, and it would somehow turn into everything else.

  You’d cook him the dinner you promised long ago, because all the hopes and dreams would eventually be watered down to a plate of stir-fried tomato and scrambled eggs. You’d watch him eat in the dim light of the kitchen and think about all the things you’d never actually say. 

  It would stop there, on that one ordinary evening that only exists in your imagination. No matter how long you wish that dinner would last.

  You close your eyes, thinking about how, years ago, you were ready to conquer the world with Wretched of the Earth and a few juvenile poems, how you thought you had life in your hands. Years later, you sit on scattered plastic bags in your ramshackle sanctuary, hoping to get through the day with a tea addiction.

  That sanctuary you keep going back to is the same place, but instead of that place where you once recounted your day to them, breathlessly enthusiastic, folding paper cranes without a single care in the world, it is now where you sit in front of the desk and type ferociously until the clicks and clacks are louder than your intermittent sobs over another rejection. You laugh at yourself, fumbling a plate of homemade omurice with your clumsy hands and a rice cooker that won’t work; the omelette tastes saltier and saltier. They are nowhere to be seen.

  There have been so many moments where you wish you could just slip away under the delusional peace of your sanctuary, leaving no trace in the world; but there hasn’t been a moment where you cease to think about those sunflower seeds, ludicrous historical dramas, and those meandering conversations that were buried under the cracks of that wooden furniture. Your life began in awe at the turn of the millennium, when you could still look at everything through fuzzy but saturated lenses.

“If you need to talk to anyone about anything, I will be here :)”

You hate to say that a text from him still makes you smile before you can stop it. “Thanks, we will probably never see each other again.”

“If you are still thinking about the US, then it’s not gonna be never.”

“I guess so.” You reply, knowing full well that it was two completely different things.

“I would love to keep in touch.”

“So would I.” You drink an obscene amount of tea. Let’s be friends forever, because that’s where the sentence ends. It feels weird that you no longer have to mess up your sleep schedule for anyone. From then on, you’d see him only on the other side of sleep.

  The world will be lost, but they will stay. They will be seen handing you The Wretched of the Earth, What is History?, Como Agua Para Chocolate amidst other books when your life is slowly drained away by another “We regret to inform you…”. They will name all the things you have forgotten you loved. “Come home, I will make you your favourite stir-fried squid with chives.” She does not know about behavioural online assessments, return offers and explosions of unrequited feelings; but she knows, more than anyone else, that it is tough to live and love. She will still let you lean on her like you once did, and she wants, more than anyone else, to be your sanctuary.

If love won’t vanish then neither will you.