Do you want to know?

She’s checking her phone again. Her tea remains untouched, it’s jasmine I suppose. I should have suggested going to a bar instead. This can not be going well, it honestly does not feel like it is. I have to exercise an exorbitant amount of will power to not ask. It won’t make a difference. It doesn’t look too good anyway, asking intrusive questions like that does not sit well with the current dating scene.

The place looked better in the photos, the colours seemed livelier somehow. It is just another cafe, a shack built on the ruins of another. I have had the pleasure of watching the same venue host about three different entities. Each more trying than the last. It’s beach themed currently, clashing awfully with the weather outside. People might say they would rather be on a beach when enduring the 15 days of physical turmoil Delhiites call winter, but judging by the rather scanty group of patrons currently occupying the establishment, the place is failing to fill that void.

I catch a glimpse at her, she looks good. Better than the pictures. Ironical how the dating scene came a full circle with the applications showing the pictures instead of one's parents when their offspring turned of marriageable age. It is reductionist though, to assume that's all it takes.

I wonder if the group sitting across from us can tell. We were good at this weren’t we, or maybe you were. You could always tell if the couple was out for a first date. I wonder if you still remember ours when you go out.

No, wait, I need to think about this beautiful person in front of me. It is frightening, trying to get to know another person. More so, with the enormousness of the social conventions that dictate meetings such as ours. There is a manual somewhere, with a list of thing that one needs to do. Most of which start with don’t, don’t try too hard, don’t be too much. If they can even sniff this modicum of investment, it is a put-off. You might as well tell them you are in a cult. That’s another one of those. If you play your cards just right, you might get to see who the real person is, about a year or two into dating them.

Times like these make me wonder why do I even bother at this point? Once you get to an age, it just gets exponentially harder to be around people. Or perhaps, just new ones. By this time, most 20 somethings have peaked and immortalised strange tid-bits of idiosyncrasies they call a personality. And the rest of one’s life is spent essentially on protecting and cementing this idea, at all costs. At any cost.

But there’s an exception. Love and death. That’s what you were. I mean look at me, I’m sitting here in front of this beautiful, confident girl, someone who looks like they know things. And all I can think of is how would I tell about this to you.

I just couldn’t take it anymore, you know. The absence that had made my home it's own. The rueful reminders of what we had, stole something from me. So I threw everything out, the towels, the dishes, even the hoodie that you chose to leave behind. You’d think it would help, but it only made the apartment as empty as my life.

I break the silence, tell her an anecdote you told me. About a friend of a friend, I lie, more to myself than to her. And then I tell her the exact tale you told me, sitting across a table similar to this. A candlelit between us. You told me of a tale your mother told you on nights you couldn’t sleep. About a woman in her town, a woman who made a ginger-honey-lemon tea that could cure a heartbreak. I leave out the part of how your mom first met your dad there. That’s a memory reserved for darker days.

The flicker of the candle was dancing in your pupils. With you, nothing else matters. You could turn a room full of strangers feel like home. I couldn’t fathom not knowing what went on in your mind. The time we spent knowing each other, completed me, unknowingly, quietly, in the dead of the night as I watched you sleep.

This is hard.

To go from having what we had, whatever it is I am being put through right now. A date. Or, no, a hangout. Date is a big word, not to be thrown around in a cavalier fashion.

People prefer to hang, hanging has no connotations, no expectations either.

But, it was harder not to do this. How long do you think a person can reasonably go without wanting any human interaction at all? I would say six weeks. That’s still two weeks more than it took me to meet my friends, who could not believe that we were no longer together. One more week, and I decided to call my parents. Whose lack of communication with one another is more than made up for by the abundance of how much they talk about each other. Another week with consolatory messages and I decided that maybe its been long enough since I had company for food. How bad could it be, to go out with a new person and just eat?

I miscalculated.

I wonder if she is thinking the same thing. Maybe her lover got lost, too. In this existence of boundless choices the chances of two broken pieces swiping right on each other shouldn’t be that slim.

I catch her glancing at her device again, maybe its work, or her mother. I ask her if she would want a cigarette? She nods. I picked up a pack two days after, it's just that the smoke makes the home smell like you still live there. What's love without the collateral damage in its wake.

‘When did you pick it up?’, she asks.

‘Back in high school, I suppose, but I did not smoke as much back then’, I reply, leaving out the part about the recent turn of events.

She nodded with a quiet understanding and replied to her own question, more for her sake than mine, ‘I picked it up from my grandfather, he used to hand-roll with his stash.’

‘Oh, used to?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, he passed away, three years ago.’

My turn to nod understandingly. What do you even say to someone who has watched someone they love die. There is nothing of permanence, only your words that effervesce just like the smoke that kills us.

We watched our relationship die, didn’t we? It wasn’t all at once, it was the little things. There was never an aha moment, but if one looks carefully enough, there are always signs. Weeks leading up to it, I saw them everywhere. In the lonely dirty mug, you left in the sink to the times we spent quietly chewing our meals. It was like getting stuck in an alternate dimension. If you’ve loved someone long enough you know better than to scream out your pain. But once you get to the land where hope dies, it feels as if you have been locked out of your self. You want to do things differently but something just won’t let you. Until you realise you have been carrying the weight of a dead relationship over to the other side. A place where the love you knew only exists as a memory in your head. A memory that envelopes your lonely existence.

Once you get here, it's hard to keep a clear head, isn’t it? Everything turns to mush, there are no concrete differences in where you stand and what you had. For the life of me, I could not remember any of the reasons why we thought this would work out. I mean, look around yourself, how often do you see happy people? Plain and simple. Its always about the things they cover-up, the things you choose to ignore. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

It's funny how running away catches up with you. Every one of us is running away trying not to fuck up. But eventually, no matter how much you may try, you will end up staring at the tapestry of all the mistakes, our kind ever did. Lovers, humans. Looking straight in your eyes from the other side of the mirror, like a cruel joke.

She asks me why my profile said not looking for anything serious. I want to tell her how towards the end of the only thing I had ever been serious about, she saw her dad in me, I saw my mother and we found ourselves fighting over the graves of the mistakes everyone had ever committed in love. Instead, I tell her that it's just not for me, what good could come out of talking about the circle of life?

I don’t know if I can tell her any of this, it isn’t advised. Even if every part of you is trying to stop your mouth from uttering the curse. ‘Would you really wanna know what I think about when I can’t sleep?’

Our existence in this dimension, in this time, with everything throttling on towards development is not the most ideal. Nothing ever really is though. But it helps, to have someone. Anyone who cares enough to ask. Nothing is destined, there is no other dimension awaiting your arrival. In a world where everything is bound by chaos, by the randomness of it all, I was amazed every time I looked over at you.

I ask her if she would want to go grab a drink at the place next door, ’They have a better theme, too’, I add. And maybe the alcohol will stop my brain from thinking about you.

‘Oh, thank god, this place was starting to bum me out’, she said.

I chuckled and asked the server for a bill.

The bar was loud, even at 5 in the evening, I ordered a single malt and lit another cigarette while she decided on hers. Dimly lit and reeking of smoke, just like home. I ask about her work after the server has brought her her glass of wine. I checked her social media, she’s a marketing executive at one of the important corporations.

‘A normal person job’, she says.

There it is, the inherent rule. Don’t ask, don’t tell. It takes a toll, though. How do I tell these people that the game is rigged from the beginning. That the system profits from our lack of success. Its a roulette that will forever be spinning, throwing at you the possibility of finding something better, someone more compatible.

I repeat our drinks, might as well get enough to forget you tonight. Or I could grab another bottle on the way home. You’d be amazed how much pain can be masked with just the right amount of distractions.

I don’t think I will be doing this again. Not anytime soon, at least. It is too taxing. The returns are too low for the investment. The sheer numbness I feel from having gulped down five drinks has still not stopped the throbbing in my head. Loneliness can not be worse. There might be love out there, but I don’t see it coming my way, definitely not garbed with the useless frivolities of social conventions. Our chances of existence are too random to mean much anyway. It is all rigged.

The DJ is playing ‘Never There’ by Cake. I see her moving along with the music, eyes closed.

She looks at me, her eyes suddenly lit with, perhaps with the knowledge of our shared brief existence.

She asks, ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Do you want to know?’

It’s the unabashed yes, spilling out without a thought the makes me think that maybe, maybe there still is love out there. Maybe life isn’t a cruel joke all together.