Crazy Little Thing Called Love

“UGH!” I shouted out loud after dropping my keys for the sixth time, whilst struggling to open my front door. I was already exactly an hour and 13 minutes late, and a fear swept over me as I thought that he had got tired of waiting and had left. After a couple more failed attempts and a drunken pep talk with myself, my alcohol infused body decided to steady itself so I could finally get into my house to meet him. I made my way to the living room, ignoring the cat as he rubbed himself against my leg (his way of telling me that he needed his kibble), and sat myself down on the couch, waiting for him.

Silence. The silence in the room was deafening. Silence overwhelmed me, acting as a constant reminder that I was alone. I hated silence. I hated it ever since he left. There was a time when I would embrace it. When we lay down in bed looking into each other’s eyes, not saying a single word, or rather, saying everything we had to, but in silence. For in that silence, I could still hear the beating of his heart, and my heart, and they seemed to beat together, melodiously, beautifully, as if making music. And now, the music had stopped. All I could hear was the beating of my heart, a discordant tune without his accompaniment. So displeasing to my ears that I wanted the beating to stop forever. And just as I thought about the crude cacophony that my beating heart was producing, I heard a faint sound, ringing louder in my ears, making the smoothest transition from dissonance to harmony, telling me, that he was here.

“Hey”, he whispered from behind, into my ears, as I felt a shiver run down my spine. I closed my eyes and breathed heavily, he had waited. He always had the perfect timing, knowing exactly when to make an entrance, making moments with him seem almost magical. I sat quietly as he made his way to the front, and held my face in his hands, greeting my eyes with his familiar smile, which comforted me and made me feel safe. The smile I had longed to see ever since our last ‘date’, two weeks ago. I had decided to stay away from him for a while, well, I was forced into it by my therapist anyway. She believed that he was toxic. And that I was insane. After all, which sane person has conversations with her dead boyfriend? Psychosis, she said and wrote me a prescription after which she gave me her card and flashed me a mechanical smile. And I decided to give it a shot, took those pills everyday for 12 days until I could take it no more. They seemed to be driving me crazy. Ironic, isn’t it?

The truth was, that they worked. That he stopped meeting me after I took those dreaded pills. And that’s what drove me crazy. I knew I had to see him, talk to him, feel his breath against my neck. I was perfectly sane in my insane mind. In my delusional world, I felt normal. It was the boring “sane” world that drove me crazy. A world where I had to work my a*s off doing a job I didn’t even like, just so I could earn some money which I would finally end up blowing on outings with people who wouldn’t give two hoots about me a few years down the line. A world where accepting a drink from a guy in a bar inevitably ended up in a night of sex ,with him leaving me in the morning, as if it never happened. A world which he wasn’t part of. A world devoid of love.

I smiled as he tapped my nose, sensing that my mind had drifted away, bringing me back to that moment with him in my dimly lit living room. I looked outside the window at the brightly lit skyscrapers, the heavy traffic on the streets, the ships sailing in the horizon, and the airplane in the sky, and yet being locked in his arms was the only world I knew. ” Shall we?”, he said as he put on our song and twirled me around, slow dancing our way to the balcony so we could dance under the moonlight, just as we did two years ago on my birthday. A heavy feeling set in my heart as I realised that all our dates were recreations of past memories, everything he said, I could almost predict. Maybe the shrink was right, I felt a sense of paranoia as I stopped to think about it, but just then he spun me around again, hugging me from the back, whispering that he loved me, at which the paranoia metamorphosed into butterflies in my stomach, and I hugged him tighter than ever and closed my eyes. He pulled away from me and held my shoulders, excitedly saying, “Stay right here, I’ll make you your favourite drink”, and disappeared into the kitchen. I watched him leave, using the opportunity to pull out a piece of paper from my pocket. Perfectly sane in my insane mind, I thought to myself, as I tore my therapist’s business card and watched the pieces fall down 20 storeys.