I spent almost six
months listening to Coldplay's The Hardest Part
daily that year. Being the lunatic romantic that I was then, I didn't deem it
just coincidental that I first heard its opening lines the night of the call.
… And the hardest part - was letting go, not taking part.
'Twas the hardest part.
***
A little under three
years back, I sat at the top edge of a U-shaped classroom, on the precipice of
an exciting new social milieu. The air was full of pre-emptive judgement -
every single garment, hairstyle, word and activity was being fed into a mixer-grinder
in each of those ninety-odd brains to churn out early opinions. For example,
despite assertions of being a wanderlust-afflicted lover of philosophical discussions, the patch of hair
dyed blonde above his forehead lent one man the stubborn, if not imaginative,
nickname Blaundie. As an articulate
gentleman earned awe by mere mention of his work with the government and a
masterfully controlled motion of hands as he spoke, time flew before the
spotlight came to my seat. The recently-oiled rotating chairs didn't creak, but
I could feel every single turn of all those chairs as if they were tightening
the knots in my stomach. I tried breaking the tension of the momentary silence
by quickly narrating my funnily long
full name, and then managed to muster just one more sentence - I like finding
out the origins of words and phrases.
***
Editing sessions for
the college literary magazine mostly didn't even bother pretending to be that -
we'd traipse in well after the agreed meeting time, and proceed to chat about
everything in the world save the stories, poems and book reviews nobody would read
the next month. It was in one such meeting, staring into a ceiling dotted
artistically with used teabags, that I wondered aloud - Why do you think the phrase falling
in love came to be? The conversation swung wildly - from the physics of
love as a gravitational force, to the semantics of love as a state of being,
via countless crude jokes. We never reached a conclusion - even a couple of
minutes of Googling didn't particularly help - but the armchair etymologists
all seemed to agree on the presumption that much like love itself, the
explanation would probably seem fairly irrational.
***
If the only words
you've ever spoken to a girl are "That wasn't Barbie - I think it was
Batman.", it's a real stretch to say you had fallen in love. But, as Chris
Martin's voice achingly explained, falling is easy. Once you're in the act of
it, the ground beneath your feet quickly disappearing, your body quickly
passing control to a fickle force, and your eyes feeling the cold slap of
flying time, letting go is the hardest part.
The call began the fall, so it was only poetic
that an SMS was the dull thud that signalled its break. The real sign of
progress, though, isn't just failing and falling, but being in a state to be
back up for the next fall. Over another
phone call a few years later, I was in love again. But that's fodder for
another story…
P.S. - A batchmate from A has started an e-zine that intends to publish a bunch of articles every weekend. Do check it out here. I'm hoping this post should go up on that sometime this week or next.
