Prose before hos

One man off the street is worth 15 from an app;

I believe you're cautious and not avoidant, I don't like when you call yourself that; 

I have no intention of meeting the men again;

Why am I being accosted by men who met me a lifetime and three personalities ago? It's cute to be vulnerable but heartbreaking when you've written them off and they attempt to look back. No, stay gone. You sang to me, held my hand and showed me off, but you didn't do enough. Okay fine, you also showed up again when I needed you and when I was down in the dumps but also, was that enough? You were doing things for yourself and now it's my turn to stay gone because I'm choosing to be with me. Perhaps in an alternate universe, you'd have a 13-year-old daughter and some feelings for me and I'd be the one who loses you because I don't want to go down that road. 

I came full circle in Gurgaon a few days ago when I was taken to the same party spot where it started from. If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, I wouldn't. Instead, I would just hug myself and tell her to be strong and do it. Sometimes you need to live through the heartbreak to see yourself look like the best version of yourself.

I want to be worshipped, and adored, and admired and if you can't step up then goodbye. 

I'm sorry, I didn't respond to your photo in bed and then another one. Instead, I went back to touching up my make-up and thinking about the pasta I'd eat for dinner. I am sorry that I didn't particularly flirt back when you came out of woodworks months later, when you promised to make things work with me and move to be with me. You did no such thing and yet, had no courtesy to apologise for painting a picture. I had men who paint with words. 'Label them, name them,' my friend said earlier on the call today. You need to spell things out and call them out on it, you don't have to live with it in your heart. He is after all a mid low-life, bore and you are a goddamn star. 

Yeah, it's okay to put down people. They get what they deserve. 

Perhaps next year, I'll make fresh, new mistakes. I'll do new quarterly personality shifts and consider climbing ambitious ladders over climbing on men and demanding equal rights in raising my unborn children with them. Honestly, what the fuck was that temporary baby fever? I don't understand. I keep revisiting the time when I was a woman possessed wondering if I'd be single in a few weeks or be prepping to have a man's baby and it puts the fear of god in me because was I willing to trade my precious life in exchange of what I believed was a safe space when it wasn't looking out for me. 

Maybe, it's us. We give people enough chances to prove us wrong, for people to be unavailable so we can fully fawn over them when all we want is a good reset. Instead of just asking for the same, we go for a man, an excuse to let us down so we can turn things around. Every time I have made a breakthrough professionally, it has been followed by something tremendously soul-crushing in my personal life. Maybe, at this point I just know, when I need a change in scenery, I need to look for an excuse to get my heart crushed and achieve another goal. 

It wasn't just that. He was cute. I mean, he was gorgeous. Really dapper. Deep eyes, pixie hair, solid nose, a jawline, the works. He was all that and real talented. If I speak more, I'll give it away so we'll have to contain within these generic, unhelpful filters. 

A year into knowing about him, I ran into him at an event; nothing big. I recall asking him for a picture and I'm pretty sure he didn't think it much of a deal. That shot is still up on my Facebook to this day (good luck trying to find it). I think it was that rare moment when I felt confident enough to do that. The next time I'd do something like that would be 9 years later on my birthday eve with a boy, I was madly in love with. 

A few years later, I heard about him, from a completely different source. If I speak more, I'll give this away but let's just say, we were in the same circle and destined to be friends, one way or another. I didn't think much about it and let the feeling stay. This is almost a decade since we got that shot and to be honest, I'd been with a bunch of writers and wankers alike so he had lost his 19-year-old talented lad sheen. I was between a soul-sucking heartbreak and a dramatic rebound situation so I was unfazed when I realised our paths crossed again.

Much as I avoided the subject of the man, our paths crossed in a way that we finally spent some one-on-one time, a few years later, after the initiation of being introduced to one another formally. He was nicer than I thought him to be; warm, kind, and gentle even though I didn't anticipate any of those qualities with him (I was 19 and wrote him as a bad boy, without knowing a thing about him). We bonded over things that I didn't think in my wildest dreams would happen. 

I shouldn't be surprised because this is not the first time things have touched my life and returned in full swing, in my face. This particular situation is a repeated, regular pattern in my life. I'll come across someone briefly and make an assumption. We'll move on with our lives and boom, one day they're in my life, full-fledged and I realise they are nothing like I made them up in my head. This happens every fucking year, with someone or the other. This has happened with men I've dated seriously, casually, in passing, friends of men I've seen and so on. This even happens at a platonic level. Case in point, my friend at work. Someone I met for the first time on my first day in office. I saw her clear her desk, say bye to everyone and leave just before she started her maternity leave (she would deliver her kid on the weekend and I was in on a Thursday, we were in the same space for a good 15 minutes and no acknowledgment besides a hi). For 8 odd months, I thought she was a really senior resource on her way to taking some time off. When we met, at an office party for the first time, I reminded her how I saw her on my first day in, which was her last day out. She and I have been friends since, something my last year self could imagine because could I ever be friends with someone who looked so cool and confident while being full-term pregnant? Never. 

I digress, but this erstwhile gorgeous guy and I had a brief run-in with our personal lives. Without getting into details, as adult life runs, we are no longer in the same radius, even by association. Though I've been repeatedly in his orbit, over and over again, we don't have any cold starts in us. I can't even say this is providence because this goddamn city is small and practically everyone knows everyone and somehow everyone knows this gent. Yet, I find it odd, how every 6-9 months, he crosses my path either via personal or professional connection and I sit and wonder about what my 19-year-old self would think. 

On most days I feel like an outlier. 

This 'growing up' with a heavy diet of 'tough love' usually translates to growing up 'alone'. The days when you had to eat tiffin alone and sit in the picnic bus alone or traverse through painfully complex math lessons in the back seat of the left row alone. 

Heh, the left row vs the rowdy girls on the right—always and forever—is as complex as trigonometry from tenth grade. 

You do a lot of growing up in growing up alone. 

Parts of it are forced on you, it's not like it was a choice given to you. You're alone in a crowd for over 7 hours, followed by struggling to understand the concept of 'sharing' your childhood with a sibling you believed would be just like you but isn't anything like you. You struggle in figuring out where and how it went wrong. It's not your fault that you don't know how two people with the same life and parents can grow up to be completely different adults. You're not supposed to know. 

One day you're 6 and alone and the next day you're 16 and have 10 friends who are pulling a surprise present for you. A white t-shirt is procured and handpainted with messages for you and pizza is bought that you share with these ten friends. You have friends who show up and care for you but in your head, you are 6 and alone through it all. 

Over the next decade, you meet people like you. Those who were misunderstood and those who struggled to fit in. Your friends in college are all those like you—the ones who grew up painfully depressed, in solitude, and had few friends or friends who they couldn't trust. You make them your world and they mean everything to you. 

Relatability is the biggest unifying factor in the world today, especially if all parties are on the same page. You encounter others like you. Growing up alone is serious business. A degree up in the chart and you will be forever scarred and anything remotely like a boyfriend in the formative years mean you didn't really grow up alone. You're faking it. 

However, somehow, wherever you ago, you find people just like you. It's symptomatic of the society to throw your type at you. I'd get into the details of how it happens but I'd also like to keep that precious detail to myself. 

You waste your time through your 20s as you navigate life. You waste time celebrating birthdays and attending parties and hosting parties and making more friends and giving yourself till the time you have nothing left to offer. You allow them in your bed and befriend them at work. You see them in your parents' friends and sister's boyfriend. You find them on dating apps begrudgingly and you also see them in the men you date. None of these people grew up alone, and neither did your closest friends today, but they're there because you offered them a sacred piece of your life—your time and companionship—that took away all that loneliness from your heart. You offered them the room and the whole damn bed in the corner of your heart where you grew up alone when you cried cause everyone had friends and partners to sit with but you didn't. 

As you grow up, you start to see kind people sharing a big trait in common, most of them grew up alone. Your closest friend from college who is still close to you because she gets what it means to be alone; the colleague you worked with briefly who understood what being alone means in a family full of crowd; the man you nearly dated who shared that trauma with you which made you realise you caught feels for him— all of them share this badge of honour. You heal your inner child telling them that they grew up alone but they are not alone in this. 

You pacify yourself giving all these examples of people you know—those who love you and those who grew up alone like you— you're all the same. You're all looking for people to make homes out of. Some made you their home and some of us are fighting hard to avoid the idea of making others into our home. A safety net that doesn't let you down like people in your childhood did. 

This is when you go on a quest. You do everything in your capacity to look for homes. When the man with a beautiful, sculpted body tells you how he was fat-shamed growing up and he was all alone, you know he's the one. You can hear the heartbeat getting rapid as he tells you this and you gently clutch his hand tightly to ensure he doesn't feel alone and look at him without saying a thing. 'I got you', he gets it. He holds you tightly when he sleeps and doesn't let you escape his arms even when you tell him you need to leave for work, 'don't leave me alone'. You tell him that you'll be back and proceed to cry in the car a little because nobody has made you feel just as safe as he did. You finally feel like belong and that you don't have to do any more growing up alone. 

You snap out of the momentary comfort that you shared when you realise he's leaving. 'I'll be back', he says. You believe him cause you shared a moment where you grieved over this painful solitude that became a part of your personality. 'If you think this was momentary then you're wrong', he insists that he's sticking around when you remind him that this is hard work and neither of us is in the space to give it that. 'We'll make it work', he tells you as he steers the ship and guides you through the trauma of navigating a complex situation alone, almost as complex as learning algebra where words are used in lieu of numbers. What was the point even? 

The point is always silly. In this case, he does leave you. He leaves you in the exact same manner as your classmates pulled a partner each and left you alone. He didn't have to pull the act but he did remarkably well. A seasoned player, you wonder, as you see him enjoy a night in with people closest to him. One day he's there and the next day he isn't. It's no big deal, you've done it before and you can do it again. 

Until it hits you many months later, on a night when you're quietly left alone in the comfort of someone else's bedroom. You can have a guestlist of over 28 people on your birthday and have 212 matches on a dating app and 5 messages in your pending folder and over 89 people in your block list but you can still very well be alone on a night when your inner child is angry at you and demanding answers. 

Why did he ever lead us on? Why were you never good enough for others? What does it take to be someone who has someone by their side? How does it feel like to have a man who doesn't abandon you for your friend? Will it ever be you who will have someone's crushing support by your side, the way you have offered everyone in your life consistently for years? It shouldn't matter after all these years and innate knowledge of operating alone in a highly productive and functional manner and yet it does. 

It does when you're alone on a Saturday night in bed and your devices are dry and you're wondering how the hell did we land up here after everything that has been going down in the fucking world.