I love you
I love you or just “love you” - Magical words that transcend the ephemerality of human life in a single moment. One thing that she had from watching her parents get on with their ordinary middle class lives was that, how much ever you love another human being, that love, shared yet unshared, unless its expressed and expressed enough, is like an orphan ghost, wandering about, taking time to wail only in the depths of night when everyone sleeps. She knew it and she didn’t like it. So, she made him bound to a pact to never stop loving, which, after making the pact, she realised was something that never needed to be said, but more importantly never stop expressing the love.
So bound by that pact, not a day went by where she didn’t tell him how much she loved him and he also obliged. But as their relation ship grew she understood something. All people are not the same. When they say “I love you”, how much ever they love the person in actuality, some times the words are not sincere enough. When he was tinkering on his laptop or watching a football game, such frivolous expressions of love was made, born more out of their pact than any deep love that she knew he had for her.
At first she lost herself over this, for the same thing that she hoped would save her from her parent’s perceived misery was like a needle thru a heart; every time he made a careless confession of love. It was like a bullet shot thru her heart which she had to gracefully accept for the want of not hurting him, how much ever it hurt her. Then after many such sleepless nights and restless days, one night she fell asleep. Later on she would wonder whether it was the sleeping pills that she had started taking or providence that made her sleep that day but time has made that fact irrelevant.
But the next morning, the moment she woke up she sensed it was different. The feeling felt right for it was not some logical conclusion she had drawn after careful deliberation for she was not even fully awake to be aware of herself. But it felt right.
She woke up to him watch her spend her last few moments of carefree slumber crouched on their bed. Whether it was just the last few moments or the whole night that she slept under those loving eyes she would never know for he never seemed to hear that question. But she knew that both would not make a difference to the way the moment had panned out.
“I love you”.
Words, not born out of any pact but from an unknown urge, that God or Darwin - take your pick, had so beautifully placed into the human psyche. Born from an unsaid, unrequested promise to care for each other for eternity, made in a moment lost to time. At that moment it made perfect sense to her. It made her happy. Happiness she had demanded from the foolish pact, happiness that it had miserably failed to give. And every passing careless confession ever made to her till then, just gave more and more meaning to that moment of truth for it was the contrast that filled her heart with joy.
From then on she never forced him to say those words though their pact continued untouched. And from then on every time she heard those words, fake or meant, they made her happy; the first by the loving wait for the second, and the second by the existence of both.
