Some Breakups Stay

By Apurva Gulanikar

You look up at the clear sky and all you can see is that person. It's frustrating how your entire life is wrapped around this one person. It's not like you don't know what else to do…it's just that you know this one the best. And you dared close your eyes for one second and now you can't find yourself again.

This is the story of your life and my life and probably every other person's life, where we lose someone. And it's not really a break up because what do you call it when you lose a friend. When memories with that one person haunt you, when you can’t eat shrikhand because guess what someone else liked it more…when you can’t listen to Kishor Kumar anymore because the first thing that comes to your mind is that person. But hey, it's not a break up…it's a fight…maybe we are on a break…you keep convincing yourself…Maybe that person will call or maybe you'll get weak enough and succumb to this growing pit in your stomach and end up calling.

Breathe! You try to calm yourself through all the chaos going on in your head. You cut your hair really short , you go for runs now, you buy yourself flowers and you dance in the streets. Because anything…absolutely any other feeling would be better than the one you are living through. You welcome pain, you like the adrenaline rush, you don’t mind embarrassing yourself anymore. All you are looking for is change. Something that does not remotely link to things that hurt, to people that hurt. And yet we are here, reading this ,thinking of that one person and hoping that life decides to flip and go back in time.

All of this sounds like something we go through in our teens or early 20s na…Something we promise ourselves that we won’t feel when we grow up and yet we are here, not knowing what to do. A four year old little boy felt pain as his pet goldfish had to go live in the sea with his grandma because now who will he talk to when his mom goes for her job.. A twelve year old girl cried as her best friend shifted to a new city because now who will play badminton under the streetlights… A twenty two year old graduate student stared at the night sky hoping to see a shooting star to make just one wish, hoping he would call just once..… A mother of two hugged her kids tighter because she didn't know how to tell them that her best friend, their dad was gone… At fifty, my neighbor of twenty years decided to move in with her son and now her house won’t light up every day…Nobody sends pulao across the streets anymore…And it hurts…But we wake up ,get dressed and walk out into the sun knowing that things will be okay. We will survive this change too.

Most of the time people don't mean to hurt you and it's probably a lot of circumstantial stuff that is causing the pain that you feel. And the worst part is will I allow myself to feel the pain. We try to be strong for everyone, but something clearly snaps in our head when it comes to ourselves. We don’t give ourselves permission to feel. We don’t allow ourselves to break down. We yell

and drive like crazy, we run and we choose to not feel. And yet all we do is feel, every second, every breathing moment of it. And there is nothing that can make it all go…until one day something snaps inside of you…and you choose to not look back anymore. In a world of boyfriends and girlfriends…we had a breakup with our best friend and it broke us. And not just because they decided to shift cities or move across the world. It's because they chose to leave and we were left not knowing what to do. They took with themself our favorite

songs, our hangout spots , tiny secrets and inside jokes that nobody else knew. And no matter how hard we try, it's hard to get over your best friend. Isn’t this one person supposed to be your constant…isn’t this person someone you got drunk with for the first time…isn’t this person supposed to be around when you don’t get the dream college or the ideal job or get dumped on your ass. We have imagined all of this and more happening again and again..playing over and over in our heads …but I guess we’ll never know. Because guess what, we had a break up with our best friend and that person never looked back and we never really got over it.

By Apurva Gulanikar