THE GOOD TAKE
Preface
This is a story about Ira and her memories of someone. IRA - she lives mostly in her own head, a hundred tabs open at once, half of them buffering, and what you're about to read is what memories she's pulled out of that noise. The thing about memories is that It doesn't store; it rebuilds. Each time we recall something, the brain reconstructs it from scratch — adding, trimming, adjusting the light — so the version you carry is never quite the version that happened. And it edits with a bias: the feelings you attached to it makes it pleasant or unpleasant. Some fade faster than others and some burn you up. Our recollection of the past slowly turns rosier than the past ever was. We are all, quietly, the directors of our own footage. We keep the good takes. We let the rest go grainy. Ira does the same - She knows she's doing it. That's the part that matters.
Happy reading!!
They weren't catching up. They didn't need to. Kavya, Navya and Ira had been sitting at this corner table long enough that the waiter had stopped asking. Cigarettes, black coffees, Kavya's lemonade espresso which she insisted was a coffee and not a lemonade and which the three of them had been arguing about for months now.
"So how did the work meetup thingy go?" Kavya
asked, not looking up.
Ira adjusted her hair. "Blahhh." She rolled her
eyes. "But it was fun. We talked a lot, philosophized everything, as
always."
Navya and Kavya started talking about something else. Ira
stopped listening. Her brain had already gone somewhere — back to a
conversation from the night before, the way it does. Always in lag. Always
arriving somewhere after everyone else has moved on.
She interrupted both of them mid-sentence. They let her.
Ten years of friendship meant they knew how her brain worked.
"They asked me if I believe in love," she said.
"And I laughed."
Kavya raised an eyebrow.
"Because I do. Just not for me. I see it in other
people — how they find warmth in each other's hands, how they fit so easily
where I never could. I believe in love like I believe in stars. Beautiful,
real, but always far away." She took a drag. "So, I told them yes. I
believe in love. Just not the kind that comes for me."
Navya looked at her for a long moment, then let out a
heavy sigh — not because she'd given up, Ira knew, but because she knew it
wouldn't reach her.
"Don't let this turn you bitter. We've discussed
this."
"I know," Ira said. "Just telling you
something that crossed my mind."
She ashed her cigarette. Outside, the city went on being
itself.
What she didn't tell them — what she'd only half-admitted
to herself — was that the conversation she kept replaying wasn't with the
people who'd asked. It was with a man who had green eyes and small creases
beside them and the specific, insufferable quality of being completely
unbothered by her.
She'd met him months ago, now. She wasn't supposed to
meet anyone.
But here's the thing: nostalgia is a trick. Your brain
edits the footage — keeps the good takes, cuts the rest, adds a filter you
didn't ask for. Everything becomes golden. Everything becomes more.
Ira knew this. She had said it at dinner parties with the
confidence. Yet here she was, nostalgic, remembering something long gone. All
of it came back to her in flashes… not all at once.
# Pub #
She was there for Maddy. Valentine's Day, a dance club,
Maddy's second date with someone whose name Ira had already forgotten.
"Doesn't it bother you?" Maddy had asked in the
cab. "Being alone on Valentine's?"
"Everyone genuinely in love is at home right
now," Ira said. "So everyone at this club is either freshly
infatuated or entirely unattached. Both are interesting to me."
"That's unhinged."
"And yet you can't find the flaw."
Maddy could not find the flaw.
What neither of them had planned for: Maddy's date
brought a friend.
His name was Arjun. He was dressed well. He had green
eyes and small creases at the corners from what appeared to be a genuine,
frequent tendency to find things quietly amusing. He looked at things slightly
sideways — the room, the drinks, menu, her — like he was always deciding
something.
The introductions happened. The usuals. After half an
hour Maddy and her date drifted to the dance floor, leaving Ira and Arjun
standing together with their drinks.
He opened his mouth to say something. She got there
first.
"You don't really need to do this. You can leave if
you have other plans."
He did something with his eyes. A slight narrowing. Like
something was funny he wasn't going to explain. "What made you think I'd
be here if I had other plans?"
That was the first time she noticed the green properly.
"Maybe you're a good friend," she said.
"So cancelling my plans makes me a good
friend?"
She rolled her eyes and walked away. He followed, which
she'd half expected.
"I came to ask what you were doing here alone."
"I, unlike you, came because I am a good
friend."
"So you have plans?"
"No."
He smiled. Did the thing with his eyes again. She stopped
walking, genuinely annoyed. He saw it immediately.
"Okay, sorry. I meant — what are you doing here
alone? And even if we'd met as strangers, no mutuals, nothing, I would still
have come and talked to someone like you."
"Really." Flat look. "What makes you think
I'd talk to a stranger?"
"Oh, you'd definitely talk to me." No
arrogance. Somehow worse than arrogance. "I'm a decent person. Dressed
nicely. And I dance amazingly. So. You would."
"Right. That's all a girl needs. Right clothing and
good dancing." She said sarcastically and moved toward the exit. Over her
shoulder: "A creep never knows he's the creep. FYI."
Outside she lit a cigarette. Cab drivers kept cancelling.
Ten minutes. The door opened and he walked out with a beer, looked at her:
"Oh. I thought you might have ran off."
"Was trying to."
He came and stood next to her. Not too close. Not
performing presence. Just — there.
"Do you have another one?"
She gave him a cigarette without saying anything.
They stood in the kind of silence that has weight. The
city filled it. He didn't try to. She noticed his hands when he lit the
cigarette — the way he cupped the flame, unhurried, like he had all the time in
the world for small things.
She looked away.
When the cab came she got in and then — she doesn't know
why, she's thought about it since — she turned back.
"Sorry for the creep comment. I didn't mean
it."
He smiled. "I know that."
The cab pulled away. She thought about those two words
the whole ride home. I know that. Who says I know that like
that – no defensiveness, no relief, like it was never even a question? After an
apology people generally say something else. But he'd simply already known.
She was not going to think about his hands.
(She thought about his hands.)
## The Café — A Thursday ##
She was late. She was always late.
"Is that where you live mostly? In your head?"
She'd barely sat down — hadn't even finished whatever
she'd been saying, something about the tube, she genuinely couldn't remember — stopped
mid-sentence. And he'd just said it, across the table, completely
straight-faced.
"Currently yes," she said. "It's crowded
but the rent is free."
He smiled. The creases appeared beside his eyes. She
looked at her coffee.
"What do you do?" she asked.
"Actually."
"Photographer."
"What kind?"
"People, mostly. Sometimes places. The occasional
thing that doesn't move and therefore doesn't disappoint me."
"Do people disappoint you often?"
"Only when they're trying to look like something
they're not." He turned his cup in circles. "You?"
"Corporate law."
"So you spend your days telling people what they
can't do."
"I spend my days finding the exact line between
'clever' and 'crime' and then standing on it."
"Which side?"
"Depends who's paying."
He laughed. She noticed the way his whole face did it —
not just his mouth, the creases, the eyes, all of it. She filed this under: DO
NOT OPEN
"Do you like it?" he asked.
"I like that it has rules," she said. "I
like that there are correct answers. I like that someone did something wrong
and I can find exactly where and point at it." She paused. "I also
write. Which is the exact opposite of all of that."
"What do you write?"
"Things I can't say out loud."
"Give me one."
She looked up. His hands were on the table — loose,
relaxed, the veins along the back of them just visible. She thought about the
cigarette outside the club. The way he'd cupped the flame. And told herself don’t
think about the hands. She opened her phone and read what she had written –
"I don't flirt," she read aloud "I orbit.
I linger where coincidence can be blamed, offer moons and songs and silence
like they're harmless. I watch hands instead of faces, hesitate instead of
confessing, and leave just enough space for wondering."
She noticed him for a second. He was very still.
"If you didn't notice," she continued,
completely straight-faced, "that's on purpose. If you did — well. Now
we're both pretending, aren't we?"
A beat.
“Okay” he nodded his head along registering all she just
spoke.
She moved to talking about something else that she doesn’t
remember now.
She remembers other few idiotic things she said like “instead
of calling in sick, we should be able to call in healthy. I'm not coming in
today. I feel really good and I don't want to waste it at work. No? Someone
should legislate this."
“Is this something you can’t say out loud?” He asked
“No, just one of the hundred things that goes around here”
she said signalling towards her forehead.
"Just for the record I notice," he said.
"I know," she said.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
He shook his head slowly. But he was smiling. The creases
again. She looked away first.
### The Beach — In Which It RAINS###
They walked because she couldn't sit still for more than
an hour.
A light rain had started — not enough to leave over, just
enough to make everything feel slightly more significant than it probably was.
She was talking — about a client, about a book, about a
theory she had about why couples stop holding hands after a certain number of
years — and he walked beside her and didn't do the thing most people did, which
was wait for their turn with their answer half-loaded. He let her sentences
finish and then land and then sit there for a second before he touched them.
Like he was developing them. Like there was no rush because nothing was going
to disappear.
"Can I ask you something personal?" she said.
"You always ask that before asking?"
"What made you start photographing people?"
He was quiet for a moment. She noticed the way he went
quiet — not absent, just inward.
"There was this man," he said, "outside a
chai stall near my house. Every morning, same spot, same cup, same expression.
Like he was holding the whole weight of something and had just decided to hold
it quietly. I photographed him for three weeks before I realised I wasn't
photographing him. I was photographing the thing people carry that they never
say."
She looked at him.
"That," she said, "was the most you've
said at once."
"You asked something worth answering."
The rain got slightly more opinionated. She pushed her
hair back. They kept walking.
"Do you think some people are just—" she
started.
"Just what?"
"Not built for the conventional version of things.
Love and all that. The whole — linear narrative. Meet, fall, stay."
"I think," he said, "some people tell
themselves that because it's easier than admitting they're scared."
She stopped walking.
"So casually cruel in the name of being honest,"
she said. "That's Taylor Swift. You don't get to just — do that to a
person on a beach."
"Was I wrong?"
She started walking again. "No but ahhh… this makes
me hate you."
"But you don't."
She rolled her eyes.
The rain was properly there now, soft and persistent.
They ducked under the overhang of a closed snack stall and stood close
together, shoulders touching, watching it fall on the water.
She was very aware of how close they were standing. His
hand was right there. She thought about reaching for it the way you think about
touching something you've been told is hot — a small, specific wanting, held
very still.
She didn't.
She looked at him — the rain on his shoulders, the small
lines on his neck, the way he was watching the water — and then he turned and
looked at her, and the air did something, for a moment she thought he might
kiss her but he didn’t. It was very infuriating for her.
They kept looking at each other for what seemed like a
really long time. She looked away first.
She felt her face doing something warm and ridiculous,
and looked hard at the water so he wouldn't see it. They stood there until the
rain stopped. Neither of them did anything else. The wanting just sat there
with them under the pretence of patience, unhurried like him.
On the way back he found a terrible plastic souvenir shop
and bought her a small, deeply ugly ceramic crab for no reason.
At the point where they'd have to split directions, they
stood for a moment.
"Same time next week?" he said.
It wasn't quite a question.
"I'll be late," she said.
"I know."
#### He stayed for SHEEP and nothing else ####
Three hours at the restaurant. The kind of three hours
that feel like forty minutes.
At some point she said: "There's this theory. The
90/10 rule. After a big relationship ends, you spend the next one chasing the
10 percent that was missing. Get so fixated on the 10 that you ignore the fact
that the new person doesn't have the other 90."
"Whose 10 percent are you chasing?"
"Very direct."
"Yes."
She smiled at her glass. "I think the percentages
have gotten confused for me"
He said nothing. He had this quality — she was beginning
to understand it — of being patient enough to wait. Not pushing. Just present.
It was, she thought, the most quietly effective thing she'd ever encountered
and she resented it slightly.
Outside the restaurant she told him she had a documentary
he needed to watch.
"What's it about?"
"Sheep grooming."
He looked at her.
"It's a real thing," she said. "Grooming
is actually important — it's not just vanity, it's their health, their skin,
regulating their temperature, keeping them from infection. So it's this perfect
collision of completely absurd and genuinely virtuous. The sheep look
incredible. I've watched it — it has multiple episodes." She thought to
herself what a pathetic excuse to have.
"And obviously I have to watch this." He said nodding
along with sarcasm so heavy which made her laugh.
They walked to her place. Inside, she put it on, poured
drinks, sat on opposite ends of the sofa with a completely reasonable amount of
space between them that gradually, over the course of ninety minutes, became
less space. Not dramatically. Just — the sofa, and gravity, and two people who
kept turning to check if the other was seeing what they were seeing.
She talked the entire way through it. He let her.
Occasionally he said one thing that reframed everything she'd just said and she
pretended this wasn't making her feel something.
At one point she said, not looking at him: "They say
only when you stop searching for love, it'll find you. But how do I explain
that to myself? It's always searching, always yearning, always reaching for
something that feels like warmth.” She kept looking away on the screen and said
“my unloved self doesn’t understand. Someone speaks kindly and I start building
a home. A small, fragile home – made of hope and imagination." She paused
for a long minute. "I've become fluent in love. I recognise its language,
its rhythm, its silence. I just — I crave the kind that comes and stays. The
kind that finally says you're home."
She kept looking on screen where now the sick sheep had
been shaved down to nothing and stood there, smaller, lighter, saved.
"You keep saying you're waiting for love that
stays," he said. "But I feel like you are someone who leaves first.
Every time” She still doesn’t look towards him “You look away first. You're
doing it right now."
She turned to look at him.
"You're supposed to agree with me when I'm being
vulnerable."
"You'd lose interest in me by Thursday if I did
that."
She kept looking at him then. A minute passed which felt
like a whole hour where they both kept looking at each other not blinking as
well. They were by now sitting almost next to each other.
On screen, the sheep walked directly into a fence. Representing
her in a way she thought
She goes near him kisses him first. Of course she did.
It was brief and then it wasn't and then she pulled back
and looked at him and he looked entirely unsurprised which was both reassuring
and infuriating.
"You knew," she said.
"I didn't know. I hoped."
"Same thing."
"It really isn't."
She laughed. He did too. The creases. She looked at them
directly this time. And kissed him back again.
He left at 2am. At the door he paused, turned back, and
said with total gravity: "I want it noted that I stayed for the sheep and
nothing else."
"Duly Noted," she agreed smiling or blushing
she couldn’t guess for herself.
She closed the door and stood there for a moment.
Then she called Kavya. Video call. Navya joined thirty
seconds later because they had clearly been waiting.
"Okay," Ira said. "So." She took a
long pause, and recalled and recollected everything from the night.
"Ira." Both yelled again.
"Fine. So we went to the restaurant, we watched a
documentary about sheep grooming, which is genuinely a thing and genuinely
moving, — there's a sick sheep that gets saved, I cried a little, not the
point. He kissed me — I kissed him — it was mutual but I definitely kissed him
first. We talked until 2am. And on his way out he stopped, turned around, and
told me, with complete seriousness, that he wanted it noted that he'd stayed
for the sheep and nothing else.”
A silence on the call.
"You," Navya said slowly, "are in some
kind of trouble."
"I know."
"Like. Real trouble."
"I know," Ira said. Quieter this time. They continued
on the call for another 45 mins. Talking about anything and averything.
##### his Place – Perfect Wednesday #####
He had been talking endlessly about his cooking. So she
joking once had asked him make him dinner. So he the set up the day and she
arrived to find him cooking something that smelled like it had ambitions.
She sat on his kitchen counter because there were no bar
stools and she'd refused a chair on principle. He handed her a glass of wine
without asking what she wanted, which should have been presumptuous but was
somehow just — accurate.
"I've been writing inside my head a lot," she
said. "Like, more than usual. Which is saying something."
He stirred whatever was in the pan. "What are you
writing?"
"That's the problem. I don't know. Sentences form
and dissolve before I can catch them. As if the words are scattered on the
floor and I'm sitting cross-legged in the middle of them making a mismatched
Lego tower." She took a sip. "My head keeps running everywhere. It's
never happy wherever it is. I just want to play with the blocks and have some
peace. And want my head to stop running around”
"Maybe it doesn't want to be caught," he said.
"Maybe it just wants to run around for a bit."
She considered this. "That's either very wise or
complete nonsense."
"Let me know which."
She watched his hands while he cooked. The veins, the
unhurried movement, the way he held the spoon. She thought about the Jane
Austen thing she always came back to — the sexiest thing a man can be
is kind, selfless, attentive, honest about his feelings. She thought:
correct, as always, infuriatingly correct.
She said none of this.
She was not going to think about the easy fit of it.
They swayed for a while, not really dancing anymore.
"If I had a camera right now," he said,
"I'd take a picture of you every day. Just to keep a record of how you
change."
"I look exactly the same every day."
"You don't. You change all the time. Every day a
little."
"Fine. How did I change today?"
He pulled back enough to look at her. Considered it
seriously, like she'd asked a real question. "Your hair's a little longer.
You're a fraction happier than yesterday." A pause. "And a fraction
sadder."
"Those cancel out. Leaving me exactly the
same."
"They don't cancel. That's the thing. You don't get
less sad because you got happier — you just become more of both. Which means
right now, this exact second, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever
been in your life."
She looked at him. "How do you know?"
"Have you ever been happier than right now? Standing
in my terrible kitchen?"
She laughed a little and said "No."
"Sadder?"
"...No."
"There you go."
"Is it like that for you too?" she asked.
"Right now?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
He didn't do the thing where people soften it. He just
said it, plainly, still holding her waist: "Because nothing makes me
happier than you. And nothing makes me sadder."
The song ended. Another one started. Neither of them
moved to change it. They stayed like that for a while.
Later, on the sofa, she read him a piece she'd written.
She didn't explain it, just read it:
"I'm not the kind of person you build a life
with. I'm the kind you barely crawl out from. I break shit when it gets too
quiet. I scream until my throat tastes like metal. I drink until I forget what
soft feels like. And I talk to God like he's the one who left me at the diner,
half-finished coffee still warm. I'm all apology and ruin and trying again when
I shouldn't. But at least it's real. At least when I say I love you, it fucking
hurts.
And if I tell you I love you, I don't mean it in that
rom-com bullshit way. I mean I'd pull out my own teeth if you asked me to. I
mean I'd drive three hours just to watch you smoke in silence. I mean I'd ruin
every good thing I have just to hear you say my name once more.
But if you ever crawl back here, don't come fixed,
don't come holy. Bring the wreckage, the rot, the shaking hands that can't hold
a thing steady. I'll still open the door. I'll hold you like the apocalypse
already happened and we're the only bastards left. Because maybe we are."
She stopped. Looked at her hands.
"This is what – It's just — these are the things I
carry around. The stuff underneath the theories and the corporate law and the
documentary recommendations."
"I know."
"I'm not asking you to respond to that," she
said.
"I know," he said again. Same two words.
Different weight.
She looked at him. His face was completely open — no
performance, no careful arrangement, just — there. Actually there.
She looked away first.
She always looked away first.
###### Love And Other Things ######
They were watching something neither of them was
watching. They were at his apartment. It was their new normal.
Across the street, visible through his window, an elderly
couple was walking — the man slightly behind, adjusting the woman's dupatta
without being asked, without her noticing, without any apparent awareness that
it was a remarkable thing to do.
Ira watched this for a moment.
"Did you know," she said, "that band-aids
exist because a man's wife kept cutting her fingers in the kitchen? The gauze
never stayed so he made something better. A neat little strip that covers a
wound without making it a whole event."
Arjun looked at the window. Then back at her.
Fettuccine Alfredo exists because Alfredo's wife lost her
appetite after childbirth and he just — cooked. The simplest thing. Because she
needed to eat and he needed to do something." She tucked her legs under
his. "Oscar Kambly made a fish-shaped cracker for his wife because she was
a Pisces. Just because. And that private joke became a global snack. It’s like
the world accidentally tasted someone's devotion."
She was quiet for a second.
"And there was this surgeon. William Halsted.
Nineteenth century — that brutal, sterile early world of surgery, before anyone
thought of softness as something that belonged in a room like that. His wife
Caroline was a nurse. Her hands cracked and bled from the constant scrubbing,
the disinfectant, all of it. And he noticed. So he made her rubber gloves. For
her hands." She looked at the window. "Sometimes love doesn't write
poetry. It redesigns the world so your hands don't have to hurt."
They sat with this.
"What ties all of them together isn't genius,"
she said. "It's intimacy. When you love someone deeply, you learn their
rhythms — their discomforts, their joys, their fears. To be loved is to be
known. And to be known—"
"—is to be cared for," he said. "Before
you ever have to ask."
She turned. He'd finished her sentence like he'd been
holding the other half of it the whole time.
"Yes," she said quietly. "Exactly
that."
His hand was near hers on the sofa. Close enough to be a
question — the same question it had always been, since the café, since the
rain.
This time she turned her hand over. Palm up. An answer.
He took it. Slid his fingers between hers, slow,
deliberate, like he was learning the specific architecture of her hand and
intended to remember it. His thumb moved once across her knuckles. Neither of
them looked at the other. They looked at their hands, at the place where they'd
stopped being two separate things.
Outside, the couple turned a corner and were gone.
They stayed like that a long time. She thought she could
probably stay like that for the rest of her life and was immediately terrified
by the thought and did not let go.
####### and then it was morning #######
She texted him at 11pm: are you awake. I need to
walk somewhere and I can't explain why.
He replied: give me ten minutes.
This is the thing about Arjun she'd never quite said out
loud — he showed up. Not dramatically, not with any particular fanfare. He just
showed up, ten minutes, there.
The garden near his house. The kind of midnight that
feels held. Jasmine doing something overwhelming. She kept talking — about a
friend who'd said to her ‘I'm too old to be feeling this way about
a heartbreak’ and how she'd thought about it for days after. Sometimes a small
thing like that would take a lot of space in her mind and heart. She was discussing
the same with Arjun.
Arjun being Arjun was listening to her and trying to make
her move on to something else.
"We've always been taught growing up is
linear," she said. "There's an age for mistakes, an age for
consequences. And then you get a job and follow the course of life. But the
juncture doesn't come once. It comes over and over. We come of age again and
again until we go to our graves." She walked. "I'm almost thirty and
I've only begun to understand parts of myself. And now when I meet someone who
makes me feel like I'm seventeen and I don't know if that's beautiful or
catastrophic."
"Can't it be both?"
"Noooo!!!” she almost yelled but didn’t and took a
long pause. She was framing her words correctly before she spoke “You have
these lines you won't cross," she said. "But then you cross them. And
suddenly you have the very dangerous information that you can break the rule
and the world doesn't end. You've taken a big black bold line and made it a
little bit grey. And every time you cross it again it gets greyer and greyer
until one day you look around and think — there was a line here once, I
think."
He was quiet.
"Which line did you cross?" he asked.
She looked at him sideways. "Several."
They walked in silence for a while. The jasmine. The held
city. Her hand found his — not dramatically, just the back of her hand against
the back of his, and then his fingers closing around hers — and neither of them
said anything about it. After walking a lot and yapping a lot she wanted to
drink something and his house being nearby helped. They went there and she
insisted to him that she wanted to sit on the roof.
They watched the sunrise from his roof. Beer, cigarettes,
the city going from black to grey to gold below them. She sat between his knees
with her back against his chest and he rested his chin on her shoulder. and she
thought: I'm such a fool for such quiet intimacy. Like yes, rest your
chin on my shoulder, I live for this, I would burn things down for this
specific feeling of being held like this.
She said none of this.
She'd told Navya once, years ago, what she wanted. Navya
had pushed her — so what is it, then, if not casual — and Ira,
who deflected everything, had for once just said it:
"I'm not meant for casual. I've seen what
half-hearted love feels like. When it finds me — actually finds me — I want to
learn how to cook his favourite meal and leave notes in his lunchbox. Paint my
nails the colour of his eyes. Learn his favourite songs. Run my fingers through
his hair on the nights his world feels too heavy, hold him until his breathing
slows, listen to everything he's been too tired to say. Take pictures of him
when he's not looking and save them like treasures. Hold his hand everywhere we
go. Remember how he takes his coffee, what makes him laugh, the way his voice
sounds when he says my name."
Navya hadn't said anything. She'd just nodded, like she'd
been waiting years to hear Ira admit it.
On the roof now, his chin on her shoulder, Ira thought:
green. I'd paint them green.
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She laughed.
"Your decision-making skills terrify me," he
continued, same tone, like he was reading a grocery list. "Being quiet
while thinking about a hundred other things does not count as being mysterious.
The face you make when you're proud of yourself should be illegal.” He paused
for a while holding her, tilting his head into Her’s after a pause he said “How
you say the most unintelligent things with all your heart and then look at me
for approval—"
"I don't do that."
"You're doing it right now."
"—and if you insist you're fine while very clearly
not being fine one more time," he said, "my fist will meet your face.
Followed by my lips."
She turned to look at him. He had said this because earlier
during her yapping session she had not said the reason to him and shrugged it
off with her classic “I’m fine”. She made a face at him that imitates him.
"You annoy me," he said. "Come
closer."
She turned back to the sunrise not his arms. But she
moved closer.
"If I didn't like you," she said, "I would
be nicer."
"I know," he said.
The city below them went fully gold.
Earlier that night, somewhere between the jasmine and the
roof, she'd said the other thing too — the one she'd never have said sober, in
daylight, to anyone:
"Being attracted to someone is genuinely so stupid.
You realise that? A person could be wearing a plain t-shirt and the sight of
one collarbone feels like you've snorted a line of something. One — one —
toned muscle and you're flatlined. Dead. They smile at you? You're in tears.
Your eyes meet across a room? Heart fluttering like an idiot. They give you one
compliment and you're mentally proposing." She'd looked at him. "It's
humiliating. The whole apparatus. I resent it deeply."
"Are you telling me something," he'd said.
"I'm making a general observation."
"About anyone in particular?"
"Absolutely not."
He hadn't said anything. He'd just smiled, the creases
deepening, and she'd had to look away.
######## the usual ########
They met briefly. A coffee, a walk, the familiar back and
forth. He was kind — he was always kind, but that day it had a specific quality
to it, attentive in a way that made her want to look away and look closer at
the same time.
They were on the walk, the part where the city thins out
and you can hear yourselves. He'd gone quiet — not his usual inward quiet, the
one she'd learned to read, but something flatter.
"You've gone somewhere," she said.
"I'm here."
"That's not what I see."
"I'm here, Ira." A little
sharper than the moment called for. He heard it too. Rubbed the back of his
neck. "Sorry."
She let it sit. Didn't fill it. This was a thing she was
learning from him, actually — that you didn't have to rush into a silence to
rescue it.
After a while he said, to the road: "Do you ever
feel like you're very good at one thing and it's quietly ruined you for
everything else?"
"Every single day. It's called having a
personality."
That got a breath of a laugh out of him. Then nothing.
Then —
"I've photographed thousands of people," he
said. "I can tell you what any of them were carrying. The man at the chai
stall. Strangers on trains. I'm very good at seeing people." He turned the
unlit cigarette in his fingers. "And I don't think anyone's ever really
looked back. I'm always the one holding the camera. You see everything, and no
one sees you. It's a good place to stand." A pause. "I think I
arranged it that way. On purpose. A long time ago."
She felt the joke arrive — the reflex, the deflection,
the looking away first. She felt how easy it would be. She let it go past her.
"Well, that's bleak," she said softly.
"And also — for the record — a deeply annoying thing to be good at. You've
basically built a career out of avoiding eye contact and called it art."
He laughed this time. But the creases didn’t appear yet.
Some of the flatness went out of him.
And then she stopped walking, so he had to stop too, and
she looked at him. Properly. The way he was always looking at everyone else.
"You are worth the conversations that take
time," she said. "Worth the patience it takes to understand you.
Worth the learning curve — loving someone with history, with depth. Worth the
days it takes to figure each other out. Worth someone showing up even when it
would be easier to withdraw." She held his eyes. "You're worth being
built with. Not just fallen into."
For once, he was the one who didn't have anything ready.
"That's a lot of words," he said finally,
"from someone who claims she can't say things out loud."
"Don't get used to it."
"I won't," he said laughing. And the creases
were back again.
There was something else she wanted to say as well. There
was always something she wanted to say. She held it the way she held all of
them, just under the tongue, for later.
He walked her out. At the point where they'd have to
split directions they stood for a moment. The city around them, ordinary and
indifferent, doing its city things.
He said: "Same time next week?"
He looked at her. Something moved across his face — she
caught it, filed it, didn't ask.
"Yeah," she said. "Same time."
She walked away. She didn't look back. She was not going
to be the person who looked back.
"Ira."
She blinked. Kavya was looking at her. Navya was rolling
her eyes, doing the thing Navya does when she's annoyed. The coffees had gone
cold.
"Which one are you thinking about? Give us the name"
Kavya asked. Gently, for Kavya.
"There's no name."
"Ira."
"There's no name," she said again, and smiled,
and the smile was real, which was somehow worse. "There's just a story I'm
writing. That's all it is now. A story."
“REALLY?” Navya said, “You did it again, being EVERYWHERE
else, just not here”
"I'm here."
"You're never here. You go off somewhere behind your
eyes and we just — wait for you to come back."
"That's the most accurate thing ever said about me
but not true, atleast this time”
They let her have it. Ten years meant they knew which
doors not to push, even when they could see straight through them.
But the truth was she had been somewhere. She'd been at
the pub, the café, the beach. The terrible kitchen. The roof at the exact
minute the city went gold. She'd been everywhere she'd already been with him.
She'd been remembering the last time, too. The thing
about the last time is that she hadn't known it was the last time — they never
announce themselves, last times, they come dressed as ordinary afternoons. You
walk away sure there'll be a next week. A next time.
There wasn't one. There just — wasn't. No fight, no
scene, no door slammed hard enough to make a story out of. It thinned out the
way light does. One ordinary evening was simply the last of them, and proving
the thing she'd always half-believed — that you never really run into people
again once their thread in your life is done. No one decides it. Certainly not
her. He wanted something more may be and he assumed she didn’t. Or maybe he didn’t
care enough to ask.
She went home.
The flat was the same as she'd left it. Keys in the bowl.
She stood at the window a while, where the light was doing nothing special, no
gold, no trick — just a random day, just a city.
Then she sat down on the floor, cross-legged, the way she
does, and opened the laptop, played a song and started writing.
They asked me if I believe in love, and I laughed.
I believe in love like I believe in stars — beautiful,
real, mostly far away. But I think, for a little while, one came close enough
that I could feel the heat of it. He never called it anything. Neither did I.
Some things are more themselves when they stay unnamed; name them and they hold
still for you, and the whole point of him was that he didn't.
I still think about his hands. Not on mine — just
near. Close enough to be a question. And I didn’t get to be the answer to that.
That's the thing about being someone who lives mostly
in her head — the rent is free but the conversations never end. I'm still
having them. I'm having one right now, technically, with a version of him I've
been editing for so long I've stopped pretending it's accurate. I know what I'm
doing. I keep the good takes. I cut the rest. I've made the light kinder than
the light ever was. This is not the same as lying. It's just the only part of
him I get to keep, so I've decided to keep it gently.
I write the way I write everything — on the floor, the
words scattered around me like blocks I can't quite fit, my head already three
rooms ahead of my hands. Scattered. Unfinished. I used to think that was the
problem with me. I'm less sure now. This isn’t a flaw – this is where the
softness gets in.
You can be in pieces and still throw light. It doesn't
ask permission and it doesn't wait to be whole. Even scattered, the light
learns to dance through the gaps. That's not me being brave about it. That's
just where I am: not fixed, not holy, still here, still — embarrassingly,
persistently — glowing.
So no. It didn't stay. They mostly don't.
But it came close enough to feel the heat. I felt it.
I was there.
I'm the only one still here, so I get the last word.
And the last word is: it was real. Not it-lasted real. Not it-saved-me real.
Just — real while it was warm. That's the only kind I've ever actually had, and
I've spent thirty years pretending I wanted a different kind.
She stopped typing. The music player played “I don’t do
love anymore by Medha Sahi.
Outside, the city kept being a city, indifferent and
enormous and entirely unbothered, exactly the way he used to be, which is
probably why she'd liked him and probably why she couldn't keep him.
She lit a cigarette and let it burn down between her
fingers, mostly unsmoked, and somewhere behind her eyes the conversation
carried on without her, the way it always did, the way it always would. He'd
told her once that she looked away first. Every time. He was right. She'd
looked away every single time. but now she doesn't. She sat and looked
straight at it — the memory, the warmth, all of it.
Links:
Songs
·
https://youtu.be/cTwsW54rM3A?si=EfMx8IyWdIv_1E-S
·
https://youtu.be/nm-WPA-SjRg?si=Yktr1bmo6idQLCqY
Sheep Documentary
·
https://youtube.com/shorts/-Z0E40LyH0k?si=Tg0V08H_bN6TI4VL
·
https://youtu.be/ZABv-Su6pFw?si=utgkRPuwVyGyyLkZ
🦉🥲🦉🥲
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