Dating : Unrequited

Sanober stood in the heart of a place that carried an old worldly charm through its historical architecture and where people moved about quickly on foot in a bid to race time carrying phones in their hands and laptops in their bags. For her though time stood still in that moment when Rohan, her friend of ten years gave her a handwritten letter a week before moving to New York, perhaps to a point of no return.

She crossed a footover bridge and walked along the coast of Arabian Sea till she could see the spread of her favourite city laid out in a U shape and settled herself into a quiet corner.

The heartfelt letter was four pages long and simply worded like his personality. She read it a few times and again waiting to feel what she’d often envisioned the protagonists to feel in the books she read but didn’t. The tides crashed into the shore, waiting for the moon that had long left the horizon and she thought of the sunflowers darting eastward at every nightfall waiting for the sun to rise when love became synonymous to longing and she knew in her heart that his love would remain unrequited for the dark side of the moon held secrets the sea could never know.

She yearned to return the letter but he talked her out of it the next day where they spoke softly amid the noisy crowd around.

“You’re thinking of the sunflowers aren’t you?” He asked.

The thing about unrequited love was that it demanded to be felt but not burn under the heat of the sun. He treated the letter as a gift that didn’t demand reciprocation.

“I just had to let you know before I leave,” he said.

And yet she tossed in bed at night and wondered if she’d have felt differently if the letter had found her at a different time when her own love for the one she’d recently met hadn’t gone unrequited and the heart wasn’t as numb.

She gave him a book as a parting gift, a story about two people falling in love at Times Square, and kept his letter pressed between the pages of a book she read often, the ink smeared in a sea of emotions where lovers moved together across distance and time, the sunflowers bloomed and the heart wasn’t as empty when unrequited love was given a second chance.