A seven-year-old boy

Dear me,

Time has indeed flown, hasn’t it? Feels like just yesterday, when I was all starry eyed, fresh and ready to take on the world. It’s been 13 years since then. Somewhere along the road, I don’t know where and how, that amazing boy we both loved so much turned into this. Into me.

I must have been 7 or 8 years old when in much more oblivious and much less obstacle time, I played with my friends in the verandah of my house. It was cricket not even the love could provide the passion for, with the ball of rubber, and stumps of bricks. The bat, thankfully, was a cricket bat gifted by someone on my 7th birthday.

One day while playing, I had hit the ball to a ledge right next to my rooftop and had gone by the stairs to retrieve it. I looked at it, intently, closely, I wanted it so badly, I wanted that ball. The ledge was about two stories down the roof the stairs led, and I was too young to understand the newton’s laws of motion and free fall under gravity. So with that motion, I jumped. But somehow, that day, I understand the biology of the pain that followed.

And that is how I had often jumped later in life, jumped into love. Into relationships. Into partnership with people who seemed so tantalizingly close, but were so far. The seventeen-year-old me learnt, with a scar, that jumping didn’t suit my body. The seventeen-year-old me, learnt slowly, with multiple scars, that falling in love, didn’t suit my heart.

And both of us were now afraid. We didn’t want to jump. No matter how amazing the match was poised at the moment we needed to jump. We avoided it. We postponed it. Found replacements. Or consoled ourselves that we didn’t need it anyway. But we didn’t jump.

God, I wonder how many times I’ve missed opportunities, stopped myself from writing, said no to going out on dates, pushed the person away I was falling in love with, only because I was afraid of jumping and falling and collapsing. And started thinking that one day the right moment will knock at the door and it’ll comfort me, and make me feel different turns out, that moment never came. you know?

But my seven-year-old self, with experience and pain and desire and determination, grew into this brave twenty-year-old guy. And a nice batsman, too. And this time around, when he hit the penultimate delivery to the ledge, with only two runs left to score, he went there, he knew where to land, how to jump, how not to push too hard, and how to make sure he was safe, and he also got the ball. He learnt well. And he is no longer afraid. Except perhaps of Mishra uncle. He, I mean I, still owe him the money for a broken mirror of his bike.

The seventeen-year-old me, after memories and hurt and healing and heartbreaks, had matured into a brave twenty-year-old, and I hope a good partner. And he knew how not to rush it, how not to expect too much, how not to assert too long, and how to heal the other one too.

We needed to fall to become who we are. And I needed to fall, to not just fall in love, but be in it.