A valley of sorrow flourishes deep within the confines of my heart. And in that valley, bound to a deprived, dark, and dingy corner, stands a mournful-looking cottage that reeks of rot. This cottage is so nihilistically grey that it’s hard to believe it’s made of muscle and blood. It’s grey like my memory of you—pale and venomous. Yet, it reminds me of a time when life was idyllic—first loves are like that, aren’t they? It was my love that brought us together. It was my love that broke us apart. You vehemently denied feeling that feeling for me while I unravelled—because what’s worse than love that’s unrequited? LOVE. Falling is so easy. But getting out, well… a thousand years might not be enough when you’re trapped. For the longest time, I believed I must bear the punishment for falling in love with you. It’s the least I deserved for bringing this unrequited curse upon myself. I was the one who chased you after all. And so for me, it was bliss while it lasted and torture ever since. But what is love if not fleeting? But you know what else is fleeting? Sanity! When you alluded to the “touch of insanity” in an email aeons ago, I assumed it was the writer in you waxing poetic. I let my reasons be back then, swept away whatever was left of you from my mind. So imagine learning—eight years later nonetheless—that you might have actually gone mad in the years since we parted ways. Over a girl that you worked with! HAA! Like Alanis once said, "Isn’t it ironic?" LOVE. Fleeting love… And finally, you know what it costs. To feel something for someone who discards you like yesterday’s news. I hope that stings. Eleven years, Shrey. For eleven years I have carried you within me, like a penance that must be paid. You’re like a wound that never heals, and I am beside myself trying to stop the bleeding. I had this firm belief that at least you got out unscathed, your life now a blank canvas that you would have painted with colours of joy and prosperity. A wife perhaps. Lovely children. A car. Luxurious holidays to the beach. A thriving career where you satisfied your creative cravings. I hoped the best for you. The more I struggled with the trauma of how you left, the happier I imagined you. Because at least then, this festering, rotting hole in my heart would have been worth it. And then today, in a random stroke of eff-all luck, my penance was over. Because someone told me about your last days at that office. For thirty minutes I heard the harrowing tale of how you allegedly sent love notes in Morse code to a girl you liked, how your efforts to woo her resulted in a formal complaint, and you had to leave. I was kinder, wasn’t I? Even when you asked me if I still thought you were a good person, moments after breaking up with me, using my vulnerabilities against me, I was kind to you. I had no reason not to be. Love, for people like me, never fades. It morphs into something almost divine—like a prayer for your lover’s good fortune. Even if they are not yours anymore. For how could love be anything but pure? How could it bow down to the false illusions of ego and pride? That’s not how you saw it. Nope, you made a mockery of it. It was a weakness for you. An inconvenience, manifested as a needy, clingy girlfriend you were attracted to but couldn’t handle. When I was told today about this unexpected spot of madness that took over the otherwise brilliant Shrey, experiencing a meteoric rise in his career, the narrator was quick to allude to the timing of it all upon discovering our relationship. “I am not sure whether he broke up with you because of her or whether he took the break-up so hard that he was looking for a rebound which ended poorly for him.” Hell, something about the bitter realisation of you having lost your one-true love in me was thrown in the ring. ME? Did this have something to do with me? Is that why you reached out back then with your apologies, demanding my anger? Requesting a walk around CP like every other date we had been on? What a messed-up thing to do. Years of trying to expel you from every fibre of my being. Breaking down into a sopping, weeping mess on the streets, at work, at home because I didn’t know what I had done wrong to push you away. How you went from doting on me one day to acting like a cold stranger the very next. You know what that does to a person? How it shapes the trajectory of every relationship they have from there on? You know what all I had to do to heal in the following years? To move on, to pause this endless loop of despair I was stuck in? Until I finally learned to absolve myself of any wrongdoing. Until I learnt to separate my love from longing. Until you knocked on my door again. Why did you do that? To make a fool out of me? To feel better because someone else trampled over your heart? What should I believe? What will hurt less? That you left me for someone else and were looking for absolution? Or that I was your undoing, like you were mine? Perhaps, unlike my unreliable narrator, I shouldn’t credit your descent into madness to me. I would like to believe I wasn’t that important in your story. To paraphrase you in one of your haunting emails that lives rent-free in my mind, “I am doing my penance, keeping you for last because I have hurt you the most. I never loved you, but everyone was entering a relationship for fun. I thought I could too. ” LOVE. That dastardly word again. MY LOVE, now a monster raging against the injustice of putting you on a pedestal when you couldn’t even be honest about why you left the way you did. So here’s my anger, Shrey. A decade too late because I finally see through you. Because apparently you didn’t find peace either. The happy ending. The love you thought you could feel for someone else, because with me, you just couldn’t tell. Because how dare you fall apart? How dare you choose this ending for us, throwing me out of the equation for the sake of your happiness, and then be miserable yourself? How dare you hide behind weed and destroy your career for unrequited love, while I had to face my colleagues every day sober and had to hide my grief from my family, drenching my pillow with bitter tears every night for years. How dare you disappear, you coward, when you should have lived your life in the open like the rest of us, with your pain a gaping wound for everyone to see. I wish I had cursed you instead, wished you the very worst, because then at least I could have taken credit for your downfall. But now I am just the emotional fool who fell in love with the poor, quiet, brilliant boy who couldn’t handle rejection from another girl without breaking into a million pieces of fragile glass. Don’t bother responding. Don't worry yourself with the why-nows and the hows of it. There’s nothing left for me to hear. Because my love is now an apology to myself.