What Else Am I Waiting For?

I think the most exhausting thing about heartbreak is not always missing someone.

Sometimes it is knowing.

Knowing everything.

Knowing what happened. Knowing what they became. Knowing what they said. Knowing what they did. Knowing what you would tell your own friend if she came to you with the exact same story.

And still, somehow, there is this tiny, ridiculous, stubborn little part of you that whispers, but maybe.

I have been living with that maybe for years.

It has been almost three and half years since I have been waiting for a man who has, in every practical sense, already left. It has been seven years since I met him, and there are still parts of me that behave as though the story is unfinished.

I know it isn’t. Or at least, my mind knows it isn’t.

My heart apparently didn’t get the memo.

I have asked myself this question so many times lately what exactly am I waiting for?  What more could possibly happen that would finally make me let go?

He cheated.

He hurt me.

There were times when he was physically violent with me.

He told me to my face that he didn’t love me.

He told me he didn’t care about me.

He blocked me, disappeared, returned, withdrew again, and in so many different ways told me that he no longer wanted the relationship I was still desperately trying to hold onto.

So what am I waiting for?

I don’t think I am waiting for more evidence.

I have enough.

Maybe I am waiting for my heart to agree with what my mind has known for years.

And that is proving to be a much slower process, because the problem is that when I think of him, I don’t only remember the man he became.

I remember the man I met.

I remember that first night.

I remember how we spent hours laughing, talking, watching things together, sharing stories, slowly becoming comfortable with each other. 

I remember waking up in the morning and realising how close I had gotten to him in my sleep, feeling suddenly shy because he was right there.

I remember my eyes fluttering open and him noticing.

And then he asked me, “Can I hug you?”

I remember him coming closer.

I remember being held.

I remember the kiss.

I remember the intimacy that followed and how beautiful and new it felt.

And then I remember the second night, when he hugged me from behind and told me he was falling for me.

There is a version of me who still lives in that morning.

She doesn’t know what happens later.

She doesn’t know about the years of resentment, the comparisons, the blocking, the things said in anger, the things that cannot be unsaid.

She doesn’t know that one day she will spend years trying to understand how someone who once looked at her so tenderly could eventually look at her with so much distance.

She just knows that a man she admires is holding her and telling her he is falling for her.

Sometimes I think I miss him.

And sometimes I realise that I miss her.

The girl I was when I met him.

She was twenty-four and thought she knew herself. She thought she understood relationships. She thought being mature among her friends meant she was mature enough for everything life could throw at her.

She was wrong about some of that.

She was young.

She made mistakes.

She hurt someone she loved.

I don’t want to absolve myself of that. I don’t need to.

There are things I did that I regret deeply, and I have carried that guilt for years. I know I hurt him, and I wish I hadn’t.

But somewhere along the way, accountability became almost indistinguishable from punishment.

I kept thinking that because I had hurt him, I deserved to keep hurting.

That perhaps everything that happened afterward was simply the price of what I had done.

And maybe that is one of the hardest things I have had to understand: being responsible for hurting someone does not mean you have to spend the rest of your life being hurt by them.

Two things can be true.

I can have hurt him.

And he can have hurt me.

I can be sorry for what I did.

And I can still believe that some of what happened to me was not okay.

I can love someone.

And I can know that I don’t want the relationship I had with them.

I think I have spent years believing that if I could just understand him enough, I would eventually understand why I couldn’t let him go.

So I tried.

God, did I try.

I thought about his childhood, his relationships, his disappointments, the things he had lost, the versions of himself he seemed to mourn. I tried to understand why he remembered certain things so intensely, why some wounds seemed to remain alive for him years later, why he struggled to let certain pages of his life stay in the past.

Understanding him became one of the ways I loved him.

And somewhere in the middle of all that understanding, I forgot to ask whether he was trying equally hard to understand me.

I think that is what hurts now.

Because I know how I responded when he was vulnerable.

I remember him calling me from Ladakh, upset, remembering things from his past, talking about someone he had loved and the mistakes he believed he had made. And I remember being gentle with him.

I didn’t need to agree with everything he had done.

I didn’t need to decide whether he was right or wrong.

He was hurting.

So I listened.

I didn’t want him to feel as alone as I had felt.

That has always been one of the strange things about loving him. Even when I was hurting, I didn’t want him to hurt.

And then, much later, I found myself vulnerable too.

I was frightened about something that had happened to me and something that I might have to face again, and I reached out to him.

I wasn’t asking him to fix my life.

I wasn’t asking him to rewrite the past.

I wasn’t even asking him for a solution.

I just wanted two words.

Are you okay?

Call me.

That’s it.

And something about what happened then finally made me understand something I had been resisting for a very long time.

When he was hurting, I instinctively moved towards him.

When I was hurting, he moved away from me.

I don’t say that to make myself the good person and him the bad one.

Life isn’t that neat.

But I think moments of vulnerability reveal things that arguments never can.

They show you what people instinctively do with your pain.

And I think I finally saw what I had been refusing to see.

There is another scene that keeps haunting me.

It isn’t even a real memory.

It’s something my mind has created.

In it, I’m holding his face in my right palm and looking into his eyes. His eyes look tired. Desperate. Almost pleading. They are the eyes of a man who seems exhausted from carrying his own life and is quietly asking someone to let him feel safe.

And that expression breaks me.

Because I know exactly what I want to do when I see those eyes.

I want to take care of him.

I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to carry everything anymore.

And then I imagine myself breaking down completely.

I’m crying, sobbing so hard that my whole body is shaking, and he pulls me into his arms.

He says he’s sorry.

And I hold him tighter.

So tightly that it almost feels like I’m clinging to him for my life.

Sometimes I wonder why this imaginary scene hurts me more than so many real memories.

And I think I finally understand.

It isn’t really about romance.

It is about repair.

In that little imaginary world, the man who hurt me finally sees that I am hurting.

He doesn’t defend himself.

He doesn’t tell me what I did wrong.

He doesn’t ask me to move on.

He doesn’t leave.

He just holds me and says he’s sorry.

And perhaps what I have wanted all these years isn’t necessarily to get the relationship back.

Perhaps I have wanted the pain to finally make sense. I wanted the person who caused some of it to be the person who helped me put it down.

But real life doesn’t always give us that kind of ending.

Sometimes the person who hurt you never becomes the person who heals you.

Sometimes they never understand.

Sometimes they never apologise in the way you need.

Sometimes they move on with their life while you are still standing in the ruins of a future you once imagined.

And that is an incredibly lonely thing to accept.

I’ve also realised how strange it has become to meet other people.

There are men who are kind to me.

Men who make an effort.

Men who are patient.

Men who remember little things.

Men who want to see me.

And I find myself staring at my phone, thinking that replying feels like a task.

I have tried.

I really have.

But there is nothing there.

No excitement.

No longing.

No emotional pull.

Sometimes not even sexual attraction.

And then I feel guilty because I think, What’s wrong with me? This person is good to me. Why can’t I just like him?

But perhaps there is nothing wrong with me.

Perhaps I am simply still grieving.

Perhaps it is unfair to ask another person to compete with six years of memories.

A new person is standing in front of me, but my mind is still comparing him to a man who exists partly in the present and partly in a memory that I have spent years polishing.

And maybe I don’t need to keep dating until someone finally manages to distract me.

Maybe I need to stop.

Not because I’m waiting for Nikhil.

But because I don’t want to use another human being as an exit route from someone else.

I think I need to let myself be alone for a little while.

Not lonely.

Alone.

There is a difference.

Because loneliness makes me want to reach backwards.

Being alone might finally give me the space to start moving forward.

And yet, even knowing all this, I still have hope.

That’s the embarrassing part.

The part I wish I could cut out of myself.

I still sometimes imagine seeing him.

I imagine what it would feel like to be around him again.

Sometimes I imagine that he’ll look at me differently.

Sometimes I imagine that he’ll understand.

Sometimes I imagine that the man from those first few months will somehow reappear.

And then another part of me remembers the last three years.

And I think:

Girl, what exactly are you waiting for?

Maybe the answer is that I’m waiting for a version of him that no longer exists.

Maybe I’m waiting for a version of myself that no longer exists either.

And maybe that’s why letting go feels so much like death.

Because I am not only letting go of a person.

I’m letting go of a girl.

The girl who thought she had found the man she would build a family with.

The girl who made playlists and CDs.

The girl who attached songs to moments and moments to him.

The girl who could hear his voice and immediately smile.

The girl who reached out her hand to hold his every chance she got.

The girl who believed that if she loved hard enough, understood enough, apologised enough, changed enough, maybe the story would eventually become the story she had imagined.

I don’t want to hate her.

She didn’t know.

She was trying to love with the tools she had.

And perhaps I don’t need to kill the hope inside her either.

Maybe I just need to stop making decisions on its behalf.

Maybe hope can exist somewhere quietly without being allowed to run my life.

Maybe I can say:

Yes, some part of me still hopes.

And I’m still going.

Because perhaps healing isn’t the moment you wake up and realise you don’t love someone anymore.

Perhaps it is much less dramatic.

Perhaps it is the morning when you still miss them but don’t reach for your phone.

The evening when a song reminds you of them and you let yourself listen without turning it into a prophecy.

The day when you remember the morning you woke up beside them and instead of thinking, I want that back, you think, God, I was so young.

The day when you can look at the life you imagined and say:

It was beautiful.

It was mine.

It didn’t happen.

And I am still here.

I don’t know when I will stop missing him.

I don’t know when his face will stop being the first face my mind reaches for when I need comfort.

I don’t know when another man’s kindness will stop feeling like something I have to work to reciprocate.

I don’t know when the hope will finally die.

Maybe it doesn’t have to die.

Maybe I just have to outlive it.

Maybe one day that little girl will walk back into my life again, barefoot and carrying all those old memories, and ask me if he called.

And maybe I’ll take her hand.

Maybe I’ll sit beside her.

Maybe I won’t tell her that she was foolish.

I’ll just tell her:

No, he didn’t call.

But we’re okay.

And maybe, finally, that will be enough.