I Don’t Ask Anyone to Stay. Not Anymore.

I don’t ask anyone to stay. Not anymore.

There was a time when I did with words, with gestures, with unnecessary apologies. I asked them to stay when they were already gone. I begged in silences, in shared playlists, in the way I remembered how they took their coffee. It was undignified.

But now?

Now I watch people leave like I watch smoke rise from a cigarette. Slowly, inevitably, without protest. Because what’s the point of screaming at fire when you already smell the burn?

I’ve learned that most people don’t leave because you did something wrong. They leave because staying requires a kind of honesty that not everyone can bear. They leave because it’s easier to disappear than to stay and explain the discomfort of their restlessness. They call it taking some space. I call it cowardice.

They used to say I feel too much. That I make things heavy. That I get too much involved. Maybe I was. Maybe I still am. But I no longer ask them to stay.

Now I nod. I start a book that I don’t finish. I pour a drink that I don’t want. I look out at a city that’s lost even its pretense of meaning. Delhi, Bombay, London, it’s all the same. Streets full of people who leave, who lie, who forget.

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Some of them leave softly. Some slam the door. Some never say a word. But all of them leave, eventually. And you learn to stop making it a catastrophe every time someone walks away.

You just sit there, hands on your lap, heart like a room that’s been emptied for the seventh time. You dust off the memories. You don’t pack them. You leave them where they are. Let them rot or bloom.

Because asking someone to stay feels like asking for rain in a season that’s already dry. It’s humiliating. And I have run out of dignity to spare.

So, no. I don’t ask anyone to stay.

Not anymore.

Stay, if you want. Go, if you must.

I will be here. Writing names, I don’t say out loud.

And when I finally get up to leave, no one will have to ask me why.

~ A

Home, Delhi

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This post was previously published on medium.com.