The Longest Distance Between People can be Measured in Words

Words have more power than we can ever imagine. The biggest distance I have seen between two people can be measured in words; some said and some left unsaid. They have the ability to distance even those who have their hearts tied together. For very long I believed I had been lucky in love.

I fell in love with Mumbai even more than I already was, when the city, in all its graciousness, introduced me to Arjun. How we met is not a story worth a movie, but how we stayed together through everything that happened might just be. My love was young and untested when I thought that my stay in Pratappur, that had gone longer than Arjun and I had expected it to go, would not even make a dent on our relationship. But I was in for a rude awakening, and perhaps rightly so. Pratappur had taken a push upward in my list of priorities and while that happened, my fiancé had to take the backseat. In the midst of the chaos that my family and hometown plunged into, the bridges between Arjun and I only stretched. Arjun had spent his early life deprived of the selfless affection we get from our families, and often take for granted. He wanted my time when I couldn’t give any, and the distance grew to a point where he mistook the lack of time, with lack of love.

Add to that the insecurities that cropped in when Arjun realised that Dr Sumit, my colleague at Maanavta Hospital, was also an old friend from college. Truthfully, Dr Sumit and I did share a history, but one that was purely platonic. We were friends who drifted in two different directions as college ended and happened to be standing at this crossroads only as a matter of chance.

Arjun’s insecurities grew into frustrations, and the frustrations translated into words that left me with wounded, and him with regret. Clearly, I wasn’t as lucky in love as I thought I was. The person I wanted by my side through the trying journey I had decided to take on, left me to walk his path alone.

With time I learnt to live on my own, but the dull ache of having lost the man I loved never went away. Now when I look back at it, maybe we needed the distance to understand each other’s dreams. The time spent away was painful, but with it came the realisation of how much we treasured each other. We took our dear time to find our way back to each other, tying our loose ends into knots, and knots sometimes leave you stronger.

I cannot say that we will not face such problems again, but what I can say is that if we do, we will tackle them with patience, empathy, and words that do not leave scars.