Fiction

I Love-

by Ruchika Aggarwal

Your own motivations can be a complete mystery to you. Actually, they can be complete lies, which you don’t realise until the truth surfaces. What I thought about Aarush as “he is weird” actually translated into “I like him”. The truth was baffling but my feelings had no rational explanation other than this. Who waits anxiously for a friend in the hallway, to the point that you get mad if he skips school and your heart jumps when you spot him on the bus?

I knew I had lost my mind. My heart had taken a stroll through the world of feelings and had somehow made a stop in the crazy world of love. I felt like beating my heart in return, for beating at the sight of him. I can’t even curse my heart without thinking of cheesy lines! I really am done for.

If I knew having a one-sided love would turn me into a complete idiot, I would have traveled back in time, especially to stop myself from having feelings for him. If I could, that is. For the advanced human race of 21st century, time travel was unfortunately still a trope of fiction, and suppression of feelings was impossible, or in other words, a miracle.

And I knew I was more of an idiot since the person that I couldn’t stop crushing on was my best friend. People had more of a shot at love if they were strangers. It was much less complicated than being friends and secretly in love. Even friends-turned-into-lovers had more luck than I had. Because in my case, it seems I was the only one who was in love. Aarush never showed any signs of affection that could be mistaken for anything but friendship.

Yet my love-clouded brain and hormone-infected senses imagined he did. That was when my misery began. As I said, I became a completely delusional idiot. There was no one to blame but myself.

I created a reality that didn’t exist- until anything was better than the truth. The truth being, that he didn’t love me. He doesn’t even consider me a friend anymore. I was like a benign tumour- a nuisance that had to be cured, that had to be surgically removed from his life. Again, the overdramatic me couldn’t help but take everything personally. He hasn’t been in touch with anyone, but I wasn’t just anyone. I felt I was in the right to take this personally.

It devastates me every time I face the reality.

I don’t know who to be anymore without him.

My world is falling apart and I am too tired to pick up the pieces. I can’t even pick myself up long enough without crumbling into a wreckage of pain and disappointments.

Most days I feel like I have lost all faith in this world. Unknowingly, my broken heart seems to have decided that trust and hope are more delusions that it can’t afford. It whispers to me at night, “I don’t need a reason to beat. I don’t need these stupid emotions. I need you to breathe, to give me oxygen, so that I can breathe back life into you. I want us to be enough for each other.”

In my defence, dealing with life’s endless poor humour needs equal parts crazy.

Each moment is a crossroads. You could choose to walk down endless paths leading to millions of other paths. But for human hearts, the choices are pretty limited. And in love, there is only one.

I knew confessing my feelings for Aarush would mean we couldn’t go back to being friends. It was a risk, a point of no return. You cannot return to the same path once you have set down a new one. Not when your footsteps have walked in the unfamiliar and embraced its possibility. They would carry the dirt of that new path always. The truth about my feelings would be that dirt-it could either take us down new possibilities or it could bury me right there, along with our dead friendship.

I hated having feelings for him. I tried to get over them but it never worked out. They never left my heart, because they never left my mouth.

I kept my love for him locked away for so long, and now I have done the same to my memories of him. It took his leaving from my side to make things unbearably hard- enough for me to scream my heart out. But he isn’t here to listen anymore.

I am a living, breathing cliche of a broken-hearted silent lover who is drowning in repeated waves of unconfessed feelings and regrets. And I think, the lessons love teaches make it unworthy to experience falling in love at all.

My only hope is to move on. To stand up after falling for him. It is a desperate wish, the same as the ones I make before blowing away a fallen eyelid.

About the Author:

I am an undergraduate student at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. I am majoring in English. I have a strong interest in languages and stories and complex human nature. Nowadays, I can be found reading Korean webtoons or playing badminton or tackling endless course readings. 

2 Comments

  1. Something that is totally relatable nowadays, I believe not every story needs to be completely filled with love and happy endings, this is something I’ve been through with one of my dear ex friend who I thought would comprehend the love from my side for him but he couldn’t, he’s all the past now which I think and I believe as one of the beautiful one although it never turned in a way that I wanted it to be I was forgetting that this feeling of love has to be mutual but me being me kept denying it and somehow after facing his wrath in some mentally brutal ways I came to an understanding that some stories are meant to be happen but they come with a lesson to make you stronger than before to prepare you for yours ever after that’s why I now can say that be good because somebody in the world is waiting for you to fill their lives with your love.
    At last beautifully written with deep words and the eloquence binded with the words I believe you’d go further than this.God bless you Ruchika behen. Amazing.

  2. Prachi chaudhary

    You have written it so great. It’s like something coming from your heart. They like a magical words for the reader.
    Keep it up dude
    Waiting for more writeup