The Last Kiss

Back in my first year of Engineering, I saw you in a navy blue shirt, with rolled-up sleeves, a tall handsome man. I liked you.

We followed each other on Facebook. I took the first step to communicate with you asking for Lab practical records. I guess that was it, it was the start of our endless chats from that day, transitioned from FB chats to WhatsApp -we exchanged numbers.

I was a vegetarian before you, but you made me fall in love with butter chicken. Trying to save our pocket money and going on dates with you, are part of the beautiful memories I had with you.

Getting drenched in the rain sitting behind you while you drive the bike, those long drives on breezy nights still give me chills.

In the most unexpected way for any of us in the world, we encountered a Covid lockdown back then, when everything was shut, and people feared to step out. He was preparing for his master’s abroad and I was still figuring out whether engineering was really my passion or not.

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He passed his exams, and just as the second wave of Covid began to ease, he booked his tickets to fly to the USA.

I still wonder how I bore the pain of separation sitting in four walls, not being able to share anything with my parents and thinking over the ultimatum given by him.

“If you want to continue this relationship, you have to come with me, or else just forget about us, move on. I am gonna move to a new place, I will have new people, I have to study hard, I have to reach high”.

I didn’t have any plans to move abroad, I asked him:

“ Can we not continue this, I will be here, right here, I will get a job, you can come once a year, but don’t give up on me”, rather I was begging.

But it took time for me to realize, that him giving me the ultimatum to end the relationship was just words, he had already killed any feeling that he had for me. Maybe it was nothing at all because it took him just one month after he got selected to find some girl there, that too online.

I was devastated, mostly because I thought I might never be able to achieve what he wanted in a girl and that’s why he found another one.
I was living in self-doubt, and didn’t know whether I would be able to love myself again.

He boarded his flight, called me
“It was nice being with you, this while, as you have seen from my Instagram stories, I have moved on, I have a life ahead, please don’t bother me by crying, I don’t have time for that, if you need anything as career guidance, I am there”

“Have a safe flight”, is all I said bawling, sitting at home, since going out was still not advisable at that time in lockdown, and I didn’t have enough money to book a flight to Bangalore to meet him for the last time.

Getting over him was painful, he was my first, but now when I think about it, only negative thoughts about him resonates with me and I realize it was meant to be broken.

Our last kiss became the one when we stopped by a riverside on a rainy day, absorbing the calmness of the night, just us together. It was a gentle kiss.