Over Words

Against all conventional wisdom and the soul-churning shrieks of the wise voice inside the head, yours truly, got into a Long Distance Relationship (LDR). I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint hearted; because it is true - all of it - the existing literature sans embellishment, decoration or exaggeration. It can test your faith in ways paralleled, perhaps, only by religion. Faith not just in the context of fidelity, but also for instance, when a ‘how are you’ is answered with an ‘I am okay’. Are they really? If they love you, for every instant, where they do let off steam, there are five instances when they did not, to spare you the guilt of not being by their side, in a moment of crisis. I have no scientific evidence for the statistic cited; just faith. Yeah! LDRs do that to you. 

Sometimes, though you hated the subject through high school, you will have to do the complicated bit of math, of weighing the probabilities of giving them space versus coaxing for details. You cannot hug them into confessing that all of everything around them is falling apart. Hugging gives anchorage and that has the same effect as veritaserum. You also give voice to every character they type. Lowering and raising sonority, stressing a pitch, in the fashion of reading a book. Don’t confuse the two, however. They are not a character that you are writing. 

Sometimes you will feel like you are dating silence, like your capacity for love has been sentenced to solitary confinement and is screeching for companionship. There will be times when your innards will revolt against it. Courting quiet is quite tormenting. When they can’t be online, when they are busy paying lip service to the Goliaths of the world, you will figure out the threshold of your patience. I know the view, from the precipice of giving up. Just remind yourself that anger, many a times, is just one part anxiety and one part missing them. 

One word. Time. We do not go on quests anymore. Our epic battles are conflicts of time management. We perform the sacrilege of letting romance compete with the moribund details of daily existence. The Cyclopses of the world that we slay are beating the red light once in a while.  However, that pays the rent. 

And yeah, no sex.  That annoying Aatif Aslam song ‘Doori Sahi Jaye Na’ has newfound depth and meaning.

Absence has the pleasure of anticipation. Through the twelve hour Skype calls, through the silences, through the falling asleep with the web camera on, there is imagination. There is a mystery in anticipation, which the ‘there with each other’ romance cannot parallel. Not everyone can understand or appreciate this, but I am speaking to the few, who can; the few who can romanticise pain; they know what I am talking about. 

LDRs run solely on communication, of the speaking and the quaint variety. Therefore, you will know the person over a few months, like you would have known someone for years. Some people call this time travel. I agree with them. 

The fact that makes it worth the trouble, is that there is a happily ever after at the end of a Long Distance Relationship. The question ‘How do you know that they are the one’ gets thrown around a lot in relationships. If you have made it through a LDR, you will, because if you can make it through this, there is nothing, absolutely nothing that you cannot work out. 

So when u are strutting on the precipice of giving up, remind yourself of how you fell in love with Mr. Darcy (or Insert Literary character of choice), after you read the letter he writes to Lizzy and know that it is possible to fall and stay in love, over words.