We Run Away

We Run Away  

There certainly were not a lot of options before us when we chose to run away from our homes. The safety and security of home is where one can find paradise, but we didn’t see our paradise in our homes. There simply wasn’t the attention we were looking for in our homes. None of our family members could possibly make our hearts beat wildly when any of them looked at us, they could never give us the feeling of being on the seventh sky each time we inched closer to any of them on the sofa. There was a feeling of social harmony in the family, and we wanted something more than this.

We lived with our families, and our family members often interacted with each other. There was a perfect bonhomie between our family members. It was such that the two families living in different homes and yet the households were considered to be one. The good relationship was what came between our dreams of being one. There was simply no way our parents could understand the platonic relationship we had formed. Both of us had formed the relationship because there was something missing in our respective homes. We did get all the love and attention of our family members, but their love was the love of family members. It was equally divided among all the family members. We wanted something more than this. We couldn’t tolerate the indivisibility of love. We wanted disinterested and impartial love. We simply couldn’t live without it. Gradually, over a period of time, it became more important than anything else for us. The two of us were the only ones who could give it to each other, we were well aware of this.

The need for disinterested love is a part of the transition from adolescence to adulthood. All of us reach the stage of life when we need huge amounts of disinterested and impartial love. The two of us had touched the points in our lives when we needed something more than the selfless and unconditional love of our family members, and we found it in each other. The two of us seemed to be the ideal person each of us was looking for. We complimented each other because both of us had the typical yearning to be loved by someone. The longing is a part of everyone’s personality, but in our cases, it was ingrained in a typical manner. We seemed to be the ideal persons for each other right from the first time we met.

We met a long time back, when we were quite young. We were in school and the feeling of love wasn’t a part of our lives to the extent it had become now. There were bubbles of puppy-love between us, and we enjoyed the excitement to the full capacity. Even then, our hearts beat wildly while we were together. A pacemaker would have been inefficient to control the fast rate at which our hearts beat. There was a ton of excitement in being together, and we were often together courtesy the good relations of our parents.

We could not retain the values of childhood for a long time, and as adults, we wanted to capture the excitement forever and a day. The problem with emotions is that they are ephemeral and can never be preserved in any single unit of time. This is also the best part of emotions. Had it been possible to preserve grief and sorrow in a block of time, some of us would certainly have done it. There  are moments in everyone’s life when bathos dominates the scene and one dives so deep in sorrow that one begins to wish life were submerged in it forever and a day. Likewise, the best part of our lives is always so short that it disappears soon after it has begun. One is left groping in the air as the sweetest moments of our lives disappear into thin air.

Our feelings were certainly meant to fade into thin air as none of us had the courage to confess the affection we had  for each other before our parents. A confession may have brought the situation to a nadir. A fraternal relationship was believed to be existent  between the two families. A knowledge of our love-story would have been more of a rude shock to our parents. No one would have been able to understand things and look at them from our points of view. The episode would have been brushed under the carpet of daily interaction and everyone would have forgotten all about it in a few days.

We didn’t want our love-story to be scribbled on foolscap papers by scholars and added to the pile of rubbish that accumulates over time in dumping-grounds. We were not prepared to give up the passion of love  for anything in the world. We made a firm mind to run away from home and establish an independent set-up which would not have any of our family members. We didn’t want to be a part of a family that was inimical to our love.

We ran away from our homes. We didn’t have a choice because she was supposed to be the host before a visiting family the next day who were to be there to discuss the final stages of a matrimonial alliance with their son. We felt like Romeo and Juliet out of the Elizabethan world out to fight the contemporary word on our own terms. We were determined not to immortalize our experience like the protagonists of the play. Killing ourselves was certainly not going to be the solution to our  problems. We had not broken conventions to kill ourselves: we had done it to enjoy the fruit of each other’s company as long as we lived. Our company was going to give us more satisfaction and happiness than the safety and security of our homes. It was to propel a feeling of being in paradise while we were together.

I hope the feeling  never leaves us.