When LAyover decides your fate

It almost felt as if I am leaving a part of myself as I boarded my flight from JFK to LAX that night. I loved New York City with an unvarnished fervor and yet there I was seated in my inadequately spaced cheap domestic flight seat, unwilling, sad and scared. The flight had a layover at ORD with enough time for boredom and binge eating. I bought myself some food which I had no interest in eating, easily distracted by my phone only to see a “What's up” flashing on the screen. And I swear to god if it wasn’t for the hilarious bio, I would never respond and maybe my life would be better. At least I thought that a month back. At this point, I am not sure about it.

In a city where I loved nothing and regretted my move every single day, there I was engaged in an endless exchange of banter with a person 2000 miles away. Every time their name popped up on my phone, my heart raced. In an explicable childlike way. But when was just texting fun? I asked, “Maybe we should meet at some point”. “But if we do, we can’t stay cynical” came the reply. As a pretext let me also tell each of you, that this was someone who warned me a million times they can’t be in a relationship. I should have known it right at the moment when my inbox buzzed to a picture with the dead ex-boyfriend. But somehow I thought everything I ever read of love over all these years would mollify the anguish of a dead ex-boyfriend spanning through 7 years. It kind of did. The first time we met in a chic bar in Chicago with a glass of Manhattan, I miserably failed to make a joke relating the drink to my ex-NYC abode. And yet there we were looking at the eyes of each other and feeling beautiful. We were never more than semi affiliated, two people who spoke and loved to speak and kissed and loved to kiss and connected and were scared of connecting. I told myself it was because we were in different places because broken people don’t want relationships because it was all in my head. I told myself a lot of things I never told this person.

I spent weeks with an inexpressive void trying to get this out of my life but it wouldn’t let me. Whenever I believed it was out of my life, I’d get a text that would reel me back in. And I wouldn’t let me, either. The affection, however sporadic, always loomed like a promise. So I accepted the invitation, asking myself what I had to lose. I ended the year in ice-cold winter. Winters can be gloomy. Stretch of Snow with no one around. An internet encounter had unfurled into something I could not imagine. August turned to January. Those phone calls at October nights, the drizzling snow as we drove through a semi desolate street, the accent, the humor and those hands on my skin all felt like a home I had nearly forgotten. The first goodbye at the airport this person kissed me saying it was a pleasure. The second time they embraced me, and I wailed. I was crying in public, too. Crying as I sat on the airport looking at the pictures I clicked, crying as I sat on the flight forced to return to a reality I hated, crying as I write this on a cold Friday morning. But I marveled, too. I marveled at the feeling of being able to feel this way. I now hold my phone every morning staring at it, waiting for the same name to flash by and it does. Not sure when but perhaps when I walked out of the coffee shop in Hyde Park that evening my heart was ready, for the kindness and honesty; the easy. For that kind of stuff: the mutual kind.