Origin Story Love Boy and a Sanitised Goodbye

There is a boy I once loved and still love differently today. We fell in love before fully comprehending what being in love entailed. Which meant our love was all kinds of unconditional.

He’s my origin story; the ‘wore school uniforms, danced in the rain and saw each other’s most child-like, sometimes embarrassing but incredibly powerful kind of love’, love story. We started out picture perfect but somewhere in our innocence lost our way.

Said boy and I have broken each other’s hearts some. Him when he gave me my first big heartbreak and me, when I unwillingly tugged him into convoluted dating principles without any clarity. Kids these days call it polyamory et al, but back in the early 2000s I could only cry my dramatic little heart out and force him into a journey neither of us were ready for. But the intensity of our love and belief in companionship was so blatantly real that it trumped my over-zealousness.

That happened a lot as I grew up. I’m slightly (hopefully cutely) haughty about how I treated all the men I ever loved. The kind of girlfriend I was, the kind of lover I was. She was loud, expressive, ran into your arms even if you were right next to her, and honest to a fault. Messy, in a constant state of yearning and over-communicating, a little too passionate for a teenage girl, but always honest. And quite the romantic.

My love has always been abundant and cinematic while still wanting of a joint bank account, someone to raise children (now animals) with, and someone to take me to the hospital when I break my hip after dancing and falling in the bathroom.

Falling, but as a result of spirited dancing. I hoped for all my men to dance with me. I wanted them to take plunges, sift through uncomfortable self-truths, run through the rain, fight for a future, laugh with borderline cruelty over dysfunctional families even as we cared for them — the works. But I made the mistake of assuming that everything that brought me searing joy and purpose would for them too. I didn’t ask them if they wanted to dance, I assumed that they did. Why would someone not want to, when music filled the air and thrummed through your body?

And they certainly didn’t tell me otherwise. All my boys were always so intent on making sure I stayed and making sure they had me, that they were not doing the difficult job of being honest with me or themselves. The familiar adage “boys mature slower than girls” does not excuse that their insecurities, feelings, vulnerabilities, were never fully revealed to me. That I was too much for them, too-fast-too-forward, that I belonged to too many people, that I was hurting them with my abrasive honesty and monumental love — was never told to me by the boys I trusted, the boys I, was being perhaps too honest with.

******

It’s very annoying to realise that there is no such thing as lack of loneliness. Even if you have someone to help with the laundry, someone to knead your feet as you rant about the asshole at work, someone to come home to and cry over taxes with — loneliness belongs to the world. I have always believed love to be the universal binder and it is one of the most potent bonds. But age has shown me that love is pretty while loneliness is more powerful and unanimously universal.

My origin story boy and I made our way to a sweet, lovely, refreshing friendship post our messy break-up. After a lot of back and forth, drama, my marriage and divorce, his next girlfriend till wife, my roster of heartbreaks, our career progressions, death and desperation, sorrow and separation, therapy and terror — we grew as individuals and found a balanced friendship steeped in mutual respect and affection.
Or so I thought.

We were 17 when we started out and today, 31.

The sweet, lovely, refreshing friendship has currently come to an end because he and therapy have declared that he carries a lot of trauma and resentment from his relationship with me and he needs to “keep our friendship at limited access.”

A friendship that has met maybe once or maximum twice a year since 2015, with a sprinkling of well-wishing messages over more than ten years.

Origin story boy and therapist seem to have forgotten that he handed me whole worlds of pain and subsequent confusions as well. That we were both very young and unknowing and also that he handed me my first caste-confusion coupled with depression when at 17 he said he had to break up with me because I wasn’t a brahmin.

He wasn’t being truthful of course, but it fit the bill. There were deeper more relevant insecurities I wasn’t to know of until later, so for over a year I thought the love of my life had to let me go because I wasn’t a brahmin. I was only allowed heartbreak, loss, and a deep sorrow that pushed me to the edge of minor self harm and a forgetting of self.

But we were young. We did not know any better. We were still honest in our love for each other, it is till date one of the most powerful rush of feelings I have ever experienced.

So when boy came back years into college and we decided to try again, I wanted to and I did try. But I wasn’t able to make it stick. I was pulled by too many other boys, too many other experiences and a constant lack of trust in origin boy because he left me in a way that caused me to stop eating and faint, and that was pretty damn scary for a young girl.

This time though, I didn’t let him leave and he didn’t leave either, even though I was constantly with other men. “Origin boy and I are a package deal”, I announced to everyone feeling morbidly superior because I believed I was operating at a relationship level hitherto unseen and unheard of. Until my marriage caused everything to come to a screeching halt till we found our way to aforementioned sweet friendship over a year after.

I know I hurt him rather badly. I spent the next many years working on myself. Understanding why I was who I was, and if that meant accepting that I wasn’t as monogamous as I forced my baby-brain to believe growing up. The work was hard but I was able to slowly and surely find and redefine myself and love in a way that made sense for me.

So when origin boy decided to tell me after finding many versions of his happily ever after with cats, a love shared with a wonderful woman and a career that makes him thrive, (one that I helped him start off in my desperation for him to find a passionate responsibility but who cares about that anymore), that my hurting him is something that he is still dealing with after a decade, many honest conversations, apologies and honest friendship later — I was left feeling stunned and foolish.
And very loudly single and lonely.

How cleanly he has absolved himself of the part he played in our breaking. In my hurt, my confusion, my beliefs. How naive I had been, not just as a 17-year-old, but as a woman who kept growing while believing that origin boy and her were being completely honest with each other through stinging truths, sifting natures, and a new friendship.

I graciously bowed out after his sanitised request for lesser access. I said the right things; that while this hurt me and our access was limited as it was but shared a closeness; it wasn’t about me. It was about his healing and I was sorry for the part I played in his trauma and I would respect what he was asking for. I did not get an apology from him, I did not get a response.

I further did not get a response when months after I reached out to congratulate him on a big work success. We used to be each other’s first cheerleaders you see, and I thought that meant something.

It didn’t. I wonder if it ever did.

I have had a long and now fascinating relationship with men, love, and sex. I have a few wonderful polyamorous relationships that have lasted long years, seeped in a mature love and an uncomplicated knowledge of each other. I have had flings, I have had long term relationships that almost resulted in another marriage but thankfully didn’t, I have had sex-less love and love-less sex and neither caused me to burst into flames.

All this did not come without the most trying, introspective ride. And pain. It did not come without battling, hating, and accepting loneliness as a part of love. Of life.

Whether that meant I was seeing someone or I was single.

Today that loneliness has manifested in crying over origin boy once again after 20 years — crying over the memory of my first love finally saying goodbye in way that makes hygienic sense on paper. It was articulated well, polite, teeth-gnashingly kind and over a series of texts.

But I still prefer the way we said goodbye as kids. With fights, tears, a bittersweet ache for each other and a whole lot more I love you’s.