It's been too long since I've posted. Way too long to just fire up a post without thrusting an explanation in your face, so here goes. Just as Gandalf took some quality "me" time after he spent his life force battling the Balrog of Moria (probably spent most of it washing his robes. Look how they turned from grey to white!), yours truly also took a time-out from life to wash his dirty linen (in private, of course). If you read my post on Trials and Errors, you'd notice that I was going to ask out a girl last year. Well, we had been really close friends for almost a year, and I was THE happiest person on the planet when we were finally together, and things were just swell. It all clicked together, as simple as solving a 2-body problem in Physics.
Except, it really hadn't clicked into place. What I also didn't know, was that instead of a 2-body problem, it was a 3-body problem which, really, cannot be solved. A beautiful private dinner, a brunch with a friend, and an episode of Sherlock's "The Abominable Bride" later, it was all over. In 1.5 days. She was still dating someone else, and I didn't know my place in the "relationship" anymore.
Obviously, such things affect one's psyche. You can't be expected to take it on the chin every time you get punched. Sometimes, you get punched in the gut, and there's no chin in the gut last I checked. Things stopped making sense to me. The whole concept of a rational world with rational expectations was thrown out of the window, and it felt like I was in a Tolstoy novel (that bugger really liked to torture his characters, just ask Maslova from The Resurrection). The "don't give two fucks about the world" wizard had finally broken down. Finally, my name made sense.
It's amazing, what sadness and anger can do to you. In my case, they caged me in my room for nearly a month till February. I started smoking, something I'd always abhorred. I smoked not because I liked it. I smoked because I hated it, it left a bad taste in my mouth, and made my head spin. But those feelings were still better than what I had in the back of my mind. Those feelings masked my pain from myself, and I could slowly move back into the functioning world. It took me about a month to develop the strength to go out and face the world. When I did, it all felt so worthless. What's the point of anything when deep down inside you know that you'll never again have the only thing that made you happier than you ever were?
That's a dangerous line of thought, though, because it breeds infatuation. You hope and you pray and you wish and you cry, believing, with all the stupid childish belief that you have left, that maybe one day you'll get a message, a call, an email or a postcard from her saying it was all a mistake, let's watch TV? I did briefly walk on the road leading to this path, but I was saved by a very unexpected savior: poker.
I started playing poker with a bunch of friends, and I liked it. I was good at it. Slowly, I began to cherish the game, playing almost every night with my friends. I came to realize, eventually, that initially it was the poker that took my mind off of the crazy stuff that I was moping about. But as I continued playing, it was the group of friends who really lifted the burden off me. They had absolutely no idea what had happened to me, so there was neither pity nor judgement involved in their relationship with me. We just got together and had a ball, that's what we did. The stories we shared, the jokes we cracked, the gossip we exchanged, all of it had a therapeutic effect on me. I was still alone, but I no longer felt lonely.
So thanks to my poker buddies, the Wistful Wizard kind-of, sort-of got back his mojo. It was March, and I was smiling again, sometimes. The sad songs in my playlist were getting fewer by the day. There were some days when I couldn't help the pain getting back in my mind, but now I knew that it wasn't the end of the world. I knew that the worst was over, and it was only a matter of time. The main question was, how much time would it take?
April passed, and so did May, and thanks to the huge volume of work in the internship, my mind was pretty much occupied. Having got an offer from the firm after the internship was cherry on the cake, and I was pretty psyched. Second year at B-School, baby! Too much free time, they'd warned. It was worth a warning, I must say. For when the dust settles and you no longer have stuff to keep you busy, guess where your mind goes? That's right, all that shit came hurtling back into memory, and I was taken down a notch or two. Somehow, the girl and I came back to talking terms, but it isn't the same. It's never the same, is it?
I cherished my friendship with her way too much for it to break down because of something we built on top of it, and that is the saddest part. I no longer expect either her or me to do something to get back together, because if there's something I've learnt through this ordeal, it's that you shouldn't expect anything. I think that's also what Krishna said to Arjuna in the Gita, but that discussion is for another day.
I am okay-ish now. I've always been lucky to have great friends, and that helps a lot. To be really honest, there's one thing I really want right now, and that is getting back to being friends with that girl, before things went awry. But as Mick Jagger came to learn, you can't always get what you want.
Here's hoping we all get what we need.
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