I Still write letters to you
~Arundhati A
This is not a letter. This is not closure. This is a testimony. A refusal to forget and be forgotten
Somewhere from a time in the future, some five years from now, maybe? I did not imagine I would survive, but I find myself writing about you.
Not because I want to, but because my memory is a house that keeps unlocking its doors at midnight. It has teeth, and it clutches on with quite ferocity. And I have spent five years trying to unclench them from my skin, and maybe I am still trying. I’ll keep trying every day for the rest of my life, I think.
You were everything; you knew that. My confidant, my escape route, my sunflower on a gloomy rainy day. You were the dream I dared to name, you were my person. The person who looked at me like I was possible, like life ought to be lived to the fullest. You taught me that love didn’t have to arrive as a compromise, that I didn’t have to constantly beg to be chosen as the first one. You made me believe that I could be seen fully and still be loved. You made me unashamed of my nakedness. Telling you about my fears without editing them to make it palatable was my blanket of comfort. Telling you about my chronic depression, lack of absolute motor skills, constant sensory overloads and questioning my absence of attention to detail made you my comfort blanket. You never tried to fix it, and you just stayed and made me understand that love isn’t at all about moulding someone but about holding them through it all.
And Delhi, dear Delhi, where we met, fell apart as first-year college students and then came back to fall in love with each other and with Delhi. Truly, it is endless, it is an unwieldy city that taught us how to vanish and be found again. In it, we carved our rituals. We named each other, over and over, like the world had permitted us to rewrite language.
I remember you, through the things you fed me, the ones that I’d never tasted, like your tundey kebabs and tulsi ki biryani, your childhood, and your silences. You walked me through streets you didn’t know either, but somehow we made each other feel like locals in a city that never truly belonged to either of us. I think we belonged only to each other, and in each other we tried to find our home.
I think I remember the times you said you’ll love despite and not because. That no one had ever felt this real, this soft, this right. And I believed you. Not out of naivety, but because the way you held me made it impossible not to. I truly believe in everything you said, and I hope you did too.
We fought over one thing, the one that decided our prophecy. You told me you could never come out to your family. That if they knew about me, about us, they would unlove you. I don’t think that was possible, but you said you would never survive being unloved by them. That you would choose them over me, every time, if it came to that. I remember my throat closing every time you said that, the air around at that moment being thicker than one I am used to breathing. I remember all your pauses in that video call. And I remember saying: “Then let’s not get there.”
But we did. And you left.
Not with cruelty. Not with final words or slammed doors. You knew I was scared of slamming doors. You left gently, devastatingly, like the slow pulling of a thread out of a stitched wound, keeping it open. The absence of your presence became the loudest thing in my life. I waited for you to return, not out of hope but out of muscle memory. Because I was used to cooking with you on the other side of the phone. I told myself maybe you'd show up, maybe my absence would make breathing difficult. Like yours did. That you’d change your mind. That maybe love could be enough. But silence has a language, and I have not learned to speak it fluently still. My lips quiver every time I talk about you.
You were the silence after the music stops at the party, and I was the listener always, still holding my breath for an encore. And I think the worst part was how you disappeared from the song of my life, our life, rather, is that the melody still insists on returning every morning. Even now, sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth or standing in line for groceries, your name flits through my mind like a moth to a flickering lamp.
Now, it has been five years. I no longer live in Delhi. I am in a city fulfilling the dream I promised I would. I left Delhi with a luggage full of love, heartbreak and hope, not because I wanted to, but because the city kept echoing with the ghost of you on most days. The Metro station near our PG. Lha Kitchen, which we called ours. The room where we first said “I love you”, not in those exact words, but in the way our bodies folded into each other like forgiveness.
In this quieter place, far from the noise and history of that city, I am trying to rebuild my sense of time. But I don’t believe in clocks anymore. I believe in sensing things. In scent. In sound. I remember you in the way the air tastes before rain. How well roasted are my coffee beans every morning? In the gentle thunder of someone humming under their breath, that’s how I first fell in love with you, isn’t it? That low hum of yours when you didn’t know I was listening. But I was, I always was.
I still don’t know how to speak about you in the past tense. There is no grammar for this kind of loss. I hope nobody ever creates one, too. You are not dead. You just chose a life that I cannot be in.
And yet, I feel like your widow. Isn’t that what we are, those of us left behind by someone who couldn’t stay, who still loved us, but not enough to be able to fight the world for us? I don’t vilify you; I just miss you, I miss our world together. It would have been 8 years old today.
I carry you everywhere. You are the scent trapped in the folds of all the clothes I stole from you while telling you, “I am stealing this too”. You are in the bruise-like ache I get when someone calls me by the name you used only when we were alone. You are in the space on my bed that no one has filled since.
I haven’t been with anyone since you. Not really. I’ve kissed people with their eyes open. I’ve gone on dates and laughed at the right moments. I’ve even let someone hold me, but I flinched. I think my body still believes it belongs to you, that it deserves only the softness that you eluded towards it.
Sometimes I think I should delete your number. Erase you from every possible thread of connection that binds us still. Throw away your lamp, and your pictures, and delete your existence from every device. But I don’t. I can’t, even if I do; my memory holds us together. Also, the idea that you might one day reach out even just to say, "I saw something that reminded me of you", keeps me tethered to the present. Keeps me from collapsing entirely into memory.
Queer love is supposed to be a possibility, isn’t it? A rupture, a rewriting of what we’re told love should look like all the time, everywhere. But for me, queer love arrived as a rupture and left me fractured and bruised. After you, I wondered if I’d ever experience desire again. Not in theory, but in the quiet, aching truth of it. In the way you’d press your hand against the back of my neck. In the way I’d fall asleep mid-conversation. In that way, I felt like my life could begin now because you were in it.
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t ours anymore. The life. The plan. The future. It broke with you leaving, and I’ve been trying to imagine a different one ever since, and I am tired of trying and hoping.
Sometimes I dream of alternate endings. The kind where we don’t fight. When you come out to your family, they surprise you by embracing me. Where we get a flat near a park, and you teach me to make all the new recipes you learned to cook during your time in the UK. Where we grow older beside each other. It’s a stupid dream. But a girl ought to dream anyway, right?
I write about you now and every time in the past five years because I don’t know what else to do, and this is what I do best. You have become my archive. A way to remember that I once knew joy, even if it was brief. I write to pin you to the page, to say: This happened. This was real. Even if no one else ever saw it.
Is this how queerness survives? In the undocumented. In the whispers. In the love that dared to exist in stolen glances and unsent texts. I write because no one else will remember this story, except for you and me. And you hate writing. I write because if I don’t, I’m afraid you’ll vanish not just from my life, but from my history.
Sometimes I think you were the love of my life. Sometimes I think I was just a detour on your way back to what was expected of you. But most days, I know this, I loved you in a way I didn’t know I could and hoped that you did too. And that has to be enough for me to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I still catch myself talking to you. Not out loud. Just…..internally. When something beautiful happens, when I read a line of poetry I love, when a song we played on loop comes on shuffle and I can’t bring myself to skip it, when I drink an excellent cup of coffee and what not. I have too much of you in me.
I wonder if you think of me. If you ever type my name and then delete it. If the love was real for you. I think it was. I have to believe it was.
This is not a letter. This is not closure. This is a testimony. A refusal to forget and be forgotten. A love story in ruins, held together by memory. I carry you like a poem I never finished. Like a book or show I can’t return to, because I know how it ends.
Maybe five more years from now, I won’t feel this so intensely. Maybe I’ll have fallen in love again. Maybe I’ll have rewritten what desire means. Maybe I’ll find someone who chooses me fully, loudly, relentlessly. But even then, I know some part of me will always be yours. Not because you asked for it, but because it came to me so freely.
I wrote something for you 5 years ago while listening to the song Roslyn, and hence I titled it that.
Roslyn
“Why did you leave?” “Where did the love go?” // “Did you cry last night?” “I saw you in my dream, again.”// “I wish you were brave” “Maybe if I were a man”// “My lips quiver when I speak of you” “Yesterday, I forgot about us and was about to call you”// “I still hope” “I’m not okay, I’m drowning even though I know how to swim”
And so, here in this imagined future, I speak this truth into the world one last time;
Once, in a city that made us small, we found something never-ending.
Once, you were mine.
And once, that was enough for the world.