Of Love Forgotten

(1)

Let us all be honest.

Being inhabitants of the 21^st  century, our life has now become a constant web of accounts.

An account here and an account there.

“Did you go to the bank?”

No. I can handle my bank account from my gmail account where I get all the notifications from my Facebook and Whatsapp accounts, not to mention my Pinterest, WordPress and Instagram accounts.

Phew!

The list goes on and on and on.

Originally, when the human mind was new to the concept of accounts and passwords and user ids, it assigned a different password and user id to each account and then promptly forgot them or got them muddled up and after repeated tries when the account refused to open, they simple created a new account.

The password recovery process was too lengthy, you see. And patience is one such virtue which the 21^st century is fast losing out on.

Nevertheless, people have now realized the trick to maintaining so many different accounts and intelligently assigns the same (or similar) user id and password to all their accounts. So basically, if I give you the id and password to my gmail account, I am technically giving you access to ALL my other accounts as well. The only difference is that YOU don’t know it because if you did, then my privacy would have gone flying out of the window since we all know that the human mind has not yet mastered the art of curbing their ever curious mind. However, that is a tale of woe which I’ll narrate some other day. For now. Let’s come back.

The tale that I am about to narrate hails from that particular time of my life when I too was a mere infant in the hands of all my newly created accounts. Among other things, this tale deals with that particular thing which most, if not all of us have –

A Forgotten Account

 

(2)

The other day I came across a paper.

No, actually I was in the process of cleaning my cupboard and in all honesty I was sitting in an ocean of paper but only one drop out of that huge ocean proved to be of any significance at all although originally it didn’t seem like it would.

A pink sheet bordered with small Butterfly prints – it was clearly a page hastily torn out from one of those many fancy diaries I owned during those early years of adolescence.

Written on it, in huge and neat cursives with red glitter pen were two statements –

1. com
2. Facebook password – i1am2a3rockstar4

Now, now, before you burst out laughing at the immaturity put on display, kindly be honest to yourself. MOST of us, at some point of time in our lives have had an email id and a password like this because, let’s admit it, “That was the Trend!”. So yes, you are allowed to laugh not only at mine but at your own email id and password from long ago because I am sort of rightly guessing that this reminded you of that id and password of yours from all those years back.

The ocean of paper on the floor remained where it was.

I got up and brought out my laptop.

Opened facebook.

And.

Logged into this account.

 

(3)

It would be wise here to spare you the knowledge of the number of notifications and friend requests I had. Suffice it to say that with an average of five notifications per day and ten friend requests every seven days… well, you get the general idea.

What surprised me most was the fact that there was only one message and choosing the obvious easy path, I opened that message first.

It read as follows :

“Hi.

I do not know when you will read this but, whenever you do..

I’d like you to know some things.

Sometimes you fall for a friend and you don’t even know why. You just start liking everything about that person. All of a sudden, like a flash of lightning, you start seeing that person in an entirely different light.

I do not know if this is love, but if how I am feeling now is what they call love.

Then.

I Love You.”

 

My Heart skipped a Beat.

 

(4)

Hop into the time machine of your mind and fasten your seatbelt. And.

GO BACK.

Go back to those colourful days of childhood crushes where your heart knew no restraint and could simultaneously crush on a hundred people all at once, about 99% of whom would be various random celebrities and that remaining one percent would be some sort of a mixture of those strangers you sometimes came across as you walked down the road of life.

How uncomplicated that time was, for the heart always had a number of people to think about and the mind happily painted pretty pictures and fantasies about them.

But Alas! Uncomplication is a luxury one cannot afford in this great complication of a world and by the natural process of the sun rising and the sun setting and time flowing by, Complications do arise.

That one Person.

That first love.

The beginnings of those complicated feelings.

That tongue tied stupor.

That dilemma.

That “Is this even Real?” feeling.

In short,

That array of confusion served appealingly on a platter called feelings and topped with an assortment of fantasies.

THAT, is hard to get rid of.

And today, when that one fragment of the wave that had long ago disappeared in the midst of the ocean called life, came and crashed against the shore, bringing with it all those bubbles of memories that had long since ceased to exist..

I was stupefied.

 

(5)

Perhaps what surprised me most was the fact that after that message there was nothing.

Just silence, in all its glory, as if he had known all along that his message would reach me at a time when any feelings became immaterial since our lives had now become parallel lines – running beside each other. But.

NEVER MEETING.

But that tiny nudge. That tiny prick I felt in the corner of my heart when I read that message.. I could not deny that.

Perhaps that’s the charm of First Love.

You never really get over it.. although you had nothing to hold on to in the first place.

I turned off my laptop and put it away.

 

                                                                                                       (6)

Perhaps some day, years and tears from now, I’ll log into this account once more.

Maybe I’ll have a family then.

Maybe a child.

And maybe one night, after kissing my child good night, and putting a blanket over my husband fast asleep on the couch, I’ll tiptoe to the balcony. I’ll look at the night sky and whisper,

“I know how you felt.”

And somewhere, in another part of the world, he too will be looking at the same night sky, with his wife fast asleep in their room, and maybe..

Just maybe..

He’ll whisper back,

“I know.

I know you know.”

–END–