When I looked at you, I didn’t see bewilderment staring back at me. May be that’s why we became friends. For the first time I saw myself reflected through your eyes. We knew, perhaps even then, that although the world saw us as different, we were both the same. So when day after day I showed up at your doorstep, you not only welcomed me, you became a part of my bizarre world.
You made sense, when nothing or nobody else did. You made a place for me that didn’t mock my very existence. I was quiet, shy, bursting out with stories I didn’t know how to tell. You didn’t play sports. Once I was telling you how at school when I have to play, I recoil from an oncoming ball for the fear of getting hit by it and instead of the laughter that I had come to expect, you looked at me as if I wasn’t an enigma. You knew what I meant. You have been there.
Your world had always been inside of you. So was mine. But in retrospect I guess you never did allow me into your deepest thoughts. Even with me, even with everything we had in common, you were still alone.
I grew up knowing you. You were the center around which I built everything. But you had no gravity of your own, nothing to hold you down and pin you to this crazy place called life. So one day you just left. I guess I was never expecting to you just leave. I have become so used to seeing the world with you, that now it feels unreal to be that weird girl again. You have left me behind to roam through these alleys of life, knowing I’ll never fit into the “conventions” again.
When people ask me if I loved you. I just can’t explain that even though I didn’t love you romantically, I loved you with all I had. They all look at me as if I had lost it when I phrase is like that. But the thing is, if you were here, you would have understood. May be that’s why it hurts so much. I never thought you wouldn’t be here to translate all these thoughts of mine so other people can understand. It feels like you have condemned me to live life knowing, no one will ever know me like you. They won’t understand my thoughts, my words, my actions. They won’t know where I come from or where it is I want to go. It hurts so bad because once you get used to someone listening to the language you speak, it’s hard to live in a world where no speaks that language anymore.
I am no longer angry at you. I am trying to understand the words you have left behind. May be you felt no one understood your words too. So I am trying really hard to listen and interpret the language of your heart. But the silence you left behind is echoing only the sorrow I carry in my soul.
Amar Shobdo 