Over the Seas and Far Away: I Wish You Were Here
India
You are here. I know that you are. I can feel your presence. I can touch you. I can smell you. You haunt this place. You is woven into the fabric of this building. I can still recall your voice, your laughter, your smile. I call your name. It whispers on the wind across five thousand miles. I blow a kiss and it transcends time and place to fall upon your lips. You live; you breathe; you are.
You are everywhere, yet you are nowhere. You have gone. It is all in my mind. Just a haunting memory of what once was and will never be again. You are lost to me. I cannot feel you. I cannot smell you. I cannot touch you. You are lost forever. You were once a stranger in my future and now a memory in my past.
You are not like bricks and mortar. You are not woven into the fabric of the building. I no longer hear your voice. And when I call your name it does not whisper on the wind. It only rebounds back to me from the four walls of this room, reminding me of emptiness and solitude. And when I blow a kiss, it does not transcend time and space to fall upon your lips. It is all wishful thinking. You are a feeling I try to recapture, but dying so fast.
I try to cling onto each fragment of you. But it is futile. I catch a teardrop only to watch it drain through my fingers: the dripping away of time, of love and of you. It is driving me insane. Each drip sounds quieter than the previous one as it hits my hand. I have been aware of it for a long time but it is fading. And the dripping appears to decrease in frequency, slower by the hour and quieter by the second. I don’t want it to stop. I want it to last forever. If it did, I wouldn’t care about it. It could carry on to its heart’s delight. It would no longer be driving me insane. And it would not be dominating almost every waking hour. It would be background noise to my life rather than the beat of it. But one day I know it will stop. It won’t last forever. Then you will be truly gone.
Do you ever think of me? How do you think of me? And if you ever read my words again, will you be reminded of my voice, my laughter, my smile? Some people are easily remembered and others, easily forgotten. Will you forget to remember me or deliberately remember to try to forget?
Love is…forever. Love is…always being together. A hundred tired romantic clichés. Romantic love is a virtuous ideal. But who is truly capable of it? Who is capable of sacrificing one’s life for the person they profess to love? Making the ultimate sacrifice. The urge for self preservation may be stronger. Words are meaningless without action. Empty rhetoric that sounds good until put to the test.
“I love you” – I want you to be the foundation for my existence? I want you to love me. I do not want to force you to love me or to love me for all of the wrong reasons. I want to capture your free will and for you to love me as I love you. A contradiction in terms? I want you – but you have to come to me because you want to. I have you – but only because you let me have you.
“I love you” – well perhaps – but I can’t really tell. Maybe it was something I ate earlier that has caused a temporary chemical imbalance in my brain. Or maybe I do love you – until I have to put it to the test. Is that good enough? I pledge my heart to you, with certain cop-outs, clauses and conditions. All I ask is that you love me unconditionally and forever. Am I being selfish? But I am my “self?” So I guess that I am.
And when my tears fell after you left, were they merely salty discharge brought about by a temporary chemical imbalance in the brain?
No! They were tears of passion. And it was not the result of some dietary condition that caused me to be physiologically attracted to you. I did not need an aphrodisiac where you were concerned. It was simply you. You caused it. I’m not in love with an empty room, bricks and mortar or a memory. I’m in love with you. I already had the foundation to my existence before you came along. You just built on top of it and made it beautiful, made it glow. No clauses, cop-outs or conditions. No empty rhetoric. I will love you unconditionally until the day I die. I wish you were here.
