A famous breakup story – Written by Sushanta Paul

When you pretended to accept everything I wanted you to accept, you should have realized that I am not one of those cheap guys who flirt with different girls every other day. To you I was just another random guy you love to pass time with. But, you were the ONLY girl I decided to let into my life in 28 years! You pretended to have feelings for me. And my biggest mistake was being in love with everything you said; you were fake, I was not. You led me on, made me fall for you and then when you realized that I had badly fallen for you, you lost interest and threw me out of your life. At first I was in denial. I couldn’t believe how I could be SO wrong in judging you; I couldn’t believe you were not the person I thought you were. I couldn’t believe the cheap mentality beneath that decent face of yours…..so deceiving! Deceiving; yes, it is!
And even then I couldn’t hate you. Instead, I started to hate myself being disgusted by how much priority I gave to, how much feelings I wasted on the wrong person. You have damaged me. I didn’t deserve this. You had no right to come to my life and play with it when you had absolutely no intention to stay in it. Now, I understand the ability to hate is a gift. It makes your life easier—You can pour all your frustration on the object of your hatred, blame it for every bad thing that happens to you, even if it is as irrelevant as a crow shitting on you. It’s funny, huh? Sometimes not being able to hate is a blessing too. Hatred holds you back, keeps you from moving on and in a way constantly reminds you of the very thing you want to forget. But what disturbs me is the grey area between this ‘hate not-hate’ dilemma. How would you explain it?

I would sit for hours staring at a book and even the kindest words would stare back at me, mockingly. Every few minutes, I would check my cellphone with little hope to see a small envelope sign at its top left corner. A message, even if it were a one syllable ‘hm’ from the number with seven and three as its last digits, was ALL I would look forward to in an entire day. My heart would miss a beat every freaking time my phone buzzed……but your text never came, NEVER!

For someone like me, who has never done anything in his life apart from dreaming of being or being with fictional characters of books and movies, being in love with both melody and its creators, feeling what I write, keeping away from the old passions is something like refusing to breathe. I could hardly sleep, even if I could, luckily, I’d see you in my dreams! I could not take you hovering in my head 24/7 any longer…….it was getting unbearable with each passing day. And then came a point when I desperately wanted to call you and ask you to treat me nicely, I wanted you to be with me, talk to me even if all of it were pretense, all words just fake. I, who had been habituated with refusing all the goddamn gorgeous girls around, whose every single wish got fulfilled at home even before he demanded, was on the verge of begging you for your time!

But I never called. Neither did I text. It’d kill me inside, but I made it a point that I’d never inbox you FIRST. You’d inbox me every 4/5 days asking me how I was. Do you know how it sounded? It was like a person who threw another person on to fire and then kept asking the latter how he was feeling at every 5 minutes interval! I’d stare at the message for a long time, a hundred thoughts racing my mind, another hundred stabs wounding my heart. Then I would reply with a small ‘not bad’ followed by a full stop. I started to like full stops! You never heard the cries of desperation behind that ‘not bad’ of mine, never saw the tears in my eyes through that ‘not bad’, never felt the intensity of my emotions that the insignificant ‘not bad’ echoed…….did you?

Do you know why I never called or texted or inboxed you first? Because I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to take it if you didn’t reply or pick up my call. I was scared of not being able to handle your neglect. I was scared of not being able to wait long enough for that reply, what if it never came? That is what you did to my self-esteem—shattered it to pieces, stomped it with your feet until it turned to dust. And all the while you acted like nothing had happened. You were living your perfect happy life while I was dying inside.

During those countless, sleepless nights I would often ask myself—was it all fake? Did you not feel a thing? Really? How could you not feel that burning chemistry that sparked between us? Was it really one-sided? How could I be so sure about you while being SO wrong? I never had the courage to ask you if you ever felt anything for me. Reason being the same: fear, which maybe you’d say, was all in my head. And I was not ready to accept it. I wanted to believe that no matter how temporary it was, it was real, that it had at least some meaning. But it never had any meaning, not for you and therefore not for me….…until yesterday…….

But you know what? You are not the end of my world. You don’t have the capability to feel with the depth with which I feel. You can NEVER be true to anyone; you can never be true to yourself. I laugh at myself for liking someone who wasn’t worthy of my trust. But I feel pity for you. Because you let someone like me go; someone who would have stopped the world for you. I know you won’t feel guilty. You are probably laughing at me right now or taking sadistic pride in your control over my emotions. You will probably say that you treated me ‘just as a friend’ and that I misunderstood everything. And you will probably never realize that what you did to me was wrong; actually, women of your type never do. You play with someone’s feelings and when you get bored you switch to the next guy. Then again I don’t care anyone anymore. Thankfully, I don’t even want you anymore. I am telling you all this neither because I want any answer from you nor because I want your sympathy but because I want closure on you. You were a bad dream and I woke up from it. Did you just get your answer?

You said those 3 words, 8 letters and I went blank. Complete black-out. Pin-drop silence. The world around me stopped, grasping the magnitude of the moment, absorbing it as much as it could. Now, I don’t want to ask you anything. I finally got my closure on you. I finally got my answer. I can finally rest because all my feelings were not pointless, after all. It doesn’t matter even if you don’t mean it. I just needed to hear it once. By saying it out loud, you have freed me from yourself…….now I have no strings attached to you………… Thank you for my happiness.