#scurf01: that night, this morning

I swipe back at the chat rooms. Empty windows, expecting conversations to pop up even half as magically as they do in my head. Conversations where someone loves me, wants me. And then they do. Of course then the person is in another continent, at a university. Teaching. actually, I'm not quite sure if he teaches there. "I want to read you" a text from him reads. I swipe left and delete the char as fast as I can. I don't want to be wanted like that. The chat bubble reappears. A gnawing empty blue stares at me and a sentence reads atop "I want you" I open the chat. "I want the whole of you" Swipe left, delete. Swoosh. Sigh. Blue dot reappears. I want the magic to end. "Not from him" a voice in my head tells me. "Why won't the office crush text me like this?" The voice continues. "Because he's spent a night with you?" A third voice joins in. "He sees me everyday at work and after our only night in the campus of the university where his mum teaches, he had nuzzled his nose between my jaw and neck and said, "Now I go back to ignoring you at work." Mildly discomforted by his words and widely amused at the way his arm had wrapped the whole of my small shoulders within his reach, I had smiled. Because I was supposed to. I was supposed to not rebel. To take it easy. To take charge. To be in control. To not lose it. To be. Be. In. The. Present. I had whimpered then and smiled to myself at having won at losing again. "Sure" I had felt like kissing him on the cheek, on the flat of his sculpted beauteous face, and atop his scrawny squinted eyes, I had wanted to plant four of the several kisses on his face before leaving his house that morning. Instead I had jadedly moved in and out of his bathroom. Looking at my face in his mirror. Astonished at the white cleanliness of the bathroom, I had soaked in details vividly from that space. And walked back to his room where the whirring of an old creaky air conditioner was accompanied by a swift fan moving at top speed. No natural light flew into his room. Devoid of finding any other details apart from his face and long slender fingers and the lovely chest, I had stepped out of bed thrice that morning to absurd details of his bathroom. To get some mental image from that night. The night. The. Night. As he had stepped out to drop me at the entry door of his house I had felt alone and had wanted for him to give me company till I found a rickety auto. No, I did not want to be protected (lies). I wanted to know that I could be protected if I wanted to. He had stood outside, on the porch in the late September, early winter Delhi sun. His boxers and tee-shirt two sizes smaller for his body. I remember his body glisten in the ten am sun, and I remember being so awashed with the visage that I forgot to see that face. He said bye, maybe. Maybe he smiled. But he did say, "I still can't believe you got ready so quickly." Little does he know am a pro at that. Packing my things and moving cities, countries, states, houses. Before any one, any thing, can hurt me I kick them out. I'm alone and that's how I protect myself. Alone is what I have and that's not how I romanticise being protected. But such it is. I can blame my parents' hinged marriage, or the steady face of death I've seen every three years in the last decade, or maybe the first and perhaps only school bestie who, after twenty-one years of friendship, had cornered my dutiful concern for her by hinting at me being homosexual, even before I got the haircut. Or maybe that's just how I was born. Alone, a recluse with brilliant people skills, extroverted jubilantly and willingly on the outside, going out for drinks every Thursday night, getting sloshed at strangers' houses, making out with every boy who treated me nicely, smiling at strangers, behaving properly with stalkers, and being utmost at peace only in the loo. Maybe that's all that I was. No adjective, no noun there to define this person, but a muggy existence damaged by a lot of things yet not completely damaged to give up. Little did he know that acting cool was my forte even before we millennials had discovered it, even before it had started killing me.