The first time you lose a man, it feels like an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale. Seismic shock of such magnitude can permanently alter ground topography, says Wikipedia. That description is congruous with the flattened terrain of your heart. You feel 100% ruined. Every night you weep, irrigating your wounds afresh.
It takes you days to get out of bed, weeks to return to work, months to revive your interests, years to recover your joie de vivre. Every time you smile now, you look wistful. Suddenly, it makes sense why “love” and “war” are often pronounced in the same breath.
The second time around, the breakup of heartbreak is different – about 65% pain, 25% fury and 10% resignation. You had a niggling feeling, right from the start, that he wasn’t the one for you. He came with more terms and conditions than an iPhone update. But you ignored them, because you’re still a novice at the fine art of recognizing red flags. Your instincts in men are raw, uncooked. You’re destined to dodder for a few more years till you learn the nuances of the game.
In your third attempt at love, you design a balance-sheet. You make two columns in your head, one each for assets and liabilities. Then you fill them out methodically – on the left side his throaty laugh, his quick wit, his emotional generosity. On the right side his anxieties, his anxieties, his anxieties. You’re so exhausted from promising him that you’re not leaving, that eventually you do. He pleads. Grovels. Sheds tears. When you refuse to relent, he calls you a fucking bitch and blocks you everywhere. This time around, you’re less angry, more amused. Your heart is 40% ache, 60% relief.
The fourth time that you find yourself drawn to a man, you approach him with the restraint of a research scientist. He is, as of now, a hypothesis, and must not be trusted until proven right. This time, you’re the anxious one. Will he cheat on you? Will he insist on watching you like a guard dog? Will he accuse you of fictitious crimes? Will he call you a whore when disagreed with? Your heart, once a bottomless ocean, is now a shallow river, keeping to its banks. You pour from it in 50 ml doses. You’re petrified of drying up, so you save most of your reserves for yourself. When he leaves, eventually – by the entirely unspectacular method of drifting away like a slow cloud – you feel no quake, only mild aftershocks.
At this point, you decide to take a sabbatical from the pursuit of love. You’re tired of being a human exhibit in the mating market. You give up your spot in that display window. Movies feel annoying, especially those that claim romance is only a second glance away at airports, so you cancel your Netflix subscription in favour of cookery channels on Youtube. You quit chewing the cud of rut and submit instead to the aroma of fresh herbs. Parsley and cilantro and thyme take over. Having no one special to dress up for, you eat as you please. The food adds twenty-two pounds to your frame – one-sixth your body weight – but not an ounce of guilt. It works like an exfoliator instead, dislodging thick layers of rumination and loss, while simultaneously nourishing the parts of you that have shrivelled and calloused. You begin to feel wholesome again. A few hundred shards of you find each other and come together.
This is a new turn of life, uneventful and mellow. And then, one day, you meet him – in an entirely organic moment, aided perhaps by the gentle light of providence.
The venue for that first encounter is unglamorous. It isn’t a nightclub or a common friend’s wedding. It is the dog park. Before you see his face, you catch a glimpse of his posterior, bent over as he is, picking up slices of fresh poop from the walking track. A jet-black Labrador – presumably the artiste responsible for the steaming pile – squats beside him, cute as a button. Despite your cultivation to never pet an animal without the owner’s approval, you find yourself reaching out to caress this guy’s ears. You haven’t seen such an adorable moppet in a long time.
The man turns to you. He has the same gooey brown eyes as his dog, and a very friendly face. “Hey!” he smiles. “You a pup parent too?”
A few weeks later, you step out for a late afternoon stroll with the moppet. His name is Lobster, by the way. The man who gave him his name is in your kitchen, preparing his trademark spaghetti in marinara sauce. It is a recipe he takes great pride in, adding generous doses of the parsley and cilantro and thyme you love. He didn’t want his nosy pet messing with the ingredients, so you’ve been requested to walk the little fella while he puts together a memorable meal.
As you lead Lobster across the street, to the park where everything changed, it occurs to you that the digits and metrics of life have undergone quite the overhaul. Self-esteem has shot up by 50%. Resentment is down by four-fifths. Contentment has multiplied several times over. Anxiety has markedly declined. There have been minor seismic shifts in lifestyle, sure, but none so big as to show up on a scale. Most importantly, you’ve stopped diluting yourself – no 5% solutions, because this man has the stomach for a stronger brew. He can take you with your essence, as concentrated as you come. You need not bite back words or suppress your spirit any more.
Innumerable trials and errors later, you’ve finally found someone who tallies the sheet and wants you whole, all your fractions and fragments included.
Like all the other men in your life, he doesn’t last forever.
He is seized by the rogue microbe on one of his dog-park walks. His lungs struggle to hold up. The RT-PCR test reveals a cycle threshold of 14% – a deceptive figure that brings you momentary relief, until the lab technician discloses that the magnitude of this infection is, in fact, inversely proportional to the Ct viral load. Lower the figure, higher the intensity.
The revelation stuns you at first, then propels you into deep despair. What is this endless travesty of numbers? Is this some sort of memo from the cosmos that you’re condemned to live at the mercy of percentages forever? Why must all your attempts at love end in decimal points that won’t round off? Are you fated to a lifetime of indivisible solitude?
The man surrenders. He wakes up one morning and casually stops breathing. The chart of his chest, with all its crests and troughs, is flattened to a plain. He is lowered into his grave by strangers. They have enveloped him in leak-proof polythene. The way they’re dressed, they resemble astronauts, except they aren’t flying into space, only protecting themselves from the corpse of a man who loved pasta and dogs. They forbid you from touching him. No funeral or prayer meet is possible. You cannot kiss him goodbye. This man, who you loved for his depths, is laid to rest four feet under. When alive, he was sunshine and birdsong. When dead, he is a plastic bag with a number.
You respond to his loss, initially, by falling off the calendar. Day and night become indistinguishable, the seasons don’t register any more. Water loses its miracle, food feels like bile. The sight of happy people grates on you like sandpaper. Their laughter abrades your skin, makes you burn. To escape everything that isn’t him, you write him into stories. You make poems out of him, and weave him into prayers. On sleepless nights, you recite him like a hymn. He remains, despite his absence, your constant companion – a source of unbearable grief at first, then of rumination, eventually of fortitude. You abandon the pursuit of love after this loss, because, empirically speaking, the odds of finding a man half as good as him are negligible. You make peace with knowing that the best is behind you, and that it is statistically improbable you will ever love better.
Besides, whenever the remnants of love start to feel unbearable, there is always Lobster. He joins you on the patio ever so often, when you sit squinting at the stars, wondering which one of them was once his father. One can’t be entirely sure, but there is this one in the north that smiles down every night, its reflection sparkling in Lobster’s ash-brown eyes, twinkling intermittently, and in those fleeting moments, this broken family is whole again.
Megha Nayar is a communications coach and fiction writer from India. She was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020. She has been a mentee-in-training on the British Council’s Write Beyond Borders programme of 2021. Her work has appeared in several lit mags, among them Trampset, Macromic, Bending Genres, Rejection Letters, Sledgehammer Lit, Gulmohur Quarterly, Potato Soup Journal and The Daily Drunk Mag. She is currently working on her first novella and maiden collection of short stories. She tweets @meghasnatter.
Typeslash Review 
Leave a comment