the ‘us’ that never happened

I have always wondered what life would have been if things took a different turn at some point in time: everything about me and you, and our short but beautiful love story. What if we were never torn apart? It’s the question that comes back to me every time I’m all to myself, and something that makes me question so many other things too.

The most spectacular thing about life is perhaps our ability to feel, and I felt all the things I could with you. I could even feel the sounds of the clouds dropping over the horizon as I walked right next to you. Your voice healed me and your touch freed me.

Maybe it was all too much to be this magical that the universe conspired against us, and in doing so, filled our hearts with poison. Now we just walk with a blank smile on our faces, so big that no one can even tell if we’ve ever loved.

I have always wondered, since then, what you really meant to me and the person I would have become if you were still with me. And each time that thought enters my mind, I find myself into the abyss of emotions that even words fail to describe at times.

Was it my fault that I could not hold onto you?

Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions and that the right ones do not even exist. Our paths crossed at a pivotal moment in our lives and it has shaped everything that we depend on today. Every song, the sunset, the rain, the night, the winds, the casual walk, and the scent of perfume: all of them somehow trace back to you and there is no escaping the inevitable.

Life is a gift and love is an instrument to feel more of life. And that’s all that it’ll ever be here, that’s how it has always been.

You said that we shouldn’t take the love we shared for granted. It was so naïve of me to think that ours would last forever.

And in all our elegant memories together, you have loved and I have too, you have cried and I have too. Perhaps that was all we needed to lose ourselves completely, only to find ourselves again.

-Yogesh Chandra