Loving like a man in September..

Beep. You have a missed call from a number. Heart jumps. Number looks familiar. I never expected to see the number again on the phone. I had deleted it. So it might not be the number.

I text.. this is Vidya, email me if it is me. Text comes back. Beep.. 'Just want to say hi'.

I offer to call. It has been 2 and a half years since the last conversation and the ending.

We talk. I love hearing your voice now as I always did. I can't be cynical. It is midnight. Barriers are down.  I confess my surprise.. especially since it was six  years since we had spent a great time together before you pushed me away.

I question and you talk.. I like that. It is good to hear your news. There are things I want to ask but you have to go. 

You ask about me and I refuse to be polite. Mental health issues. You don't want to hear about those and I am not going to tell you nice things. Yeah, I am more than my mental health issues..  I sense the distance again in the voice and I wonder what you expected when you called. We talk, we laugh a little bit.

I look at the number, I don't believe it. I don't save the number. You say you will call back when you get credit and I say no problems,  you want to talk I will call you.
 
Carefully composed message of congratulations to a loved one because love is also about encouraging but then wondering given all the pushing away.. t or not since the loved one had put a block and space which was sometimes crossed. Sending it . Same week , three years ago when there was a message.. "Vidya I want us to be friends";.. but I don't do friends with loved ones and I wondered if I should have lied and just said yeah yeah okay, I can pretend that you had not told me the things you had told me in the past and we could just talk polite stuff. Normal stuff you called it.


'You okay? How are you?" and I wondered whether to answer but I aint the kind of man who don't answer, and three years after the long conversation when  you told me about your spouse and your new life and so on and I listened. I reply.. mental health issues.. and there is no reply.  

You both have spouses and other loved ones.  It is a strange week, these wisps resurfacing.. kind of like jumbies from the heart.  It is more easy to deal with the 'enemies' than it is to deal with these random connections which mean more to me than both of you.

September and October I had put down to aggressive healing, to moving on and to getting on with health and wellness. Loving like a man for me means honesty, truth. I don't want barriers of politeness when there was a time when we never had barriers. 

I love you both. I wished that we could have been just friends at the beginning and then we could have remained friends and that would have been easy. I wish that I had enough sense to maintain enough distance and nourish from afar rather than encourage the intense closeness that signifies good love and bad love.


But it isn't like that.

I know that you are both happy in your lives. I will continue to keep my distance, keep the space so you can reach out when you want to or if you need anything. I am not expecting anything. I lie, I wonder if we would ever move not back, but forward to that place where there is the intense closeness that signifies bad love and good love given our life experiences.